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The Largest Minority Round Table Discussion: Glee and Disability in Pop Culture

Anna — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 23:45:07 +0000

Last week s.e. smith and several other members of the disability community, including Alice Sheppard (a dancer with AXIS wheelchair dance company), TK Small (a lawyer and disability rights activist), Christine Bruno (who works with the advocacy group Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts), and Maysoon Zayidd (an actor and comedienne with Cerebral Palsy).

came together on the WBAI show The Largest Minority to discuss Glee and depictions of disability in popular culture. This particular episode of the radio show was inspired by s.e.’s post, A Very Glee Christmas.

You can download directly from their site: This is a direct download link to save-as. Alternately, you can play it on the WBAI site by going to their archives and scrolling down to Shared Timeslot Wednesday 10pm to 11pm on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 10:00 pm. Alternately, you can read the transcript.

The actual show itself doesn’t start until 3:52 in to the program slot.

It’s taken me a while to get the transcript of this done, for which I apologize. I did mean to get this up far faster than I did. I also should note that I had some difficulties always identifying who was speaking, and there are points in the program where the show’s audio cuts out terribly and I’m unsure what they’re saying.
Starts at around 3:52 on the download

Announcer: Good evening, Babylon. Welcome to the Largest Minority, WBAI’s program focusing on the news and views of people living with disabilities. Our aim is to increase communication within our community, and to facilitate understanding with society above labels and beyond classifications. Largest Minority airs right after [?] computer show at 9pm on the Second and Fourth Wednesdays of each month, alternating with the Joy of Resistance, Multicultural Feminist Radio. And we like to think of it since this is the season as WBAI’s Island of Misfit Toys. And today, stranded with me on the island is Attorney TK Small in studio and we have, rockin’ the board tonight, our friend Sydney Smith.

For tonight’s show we are going to have a round table discussion with Lawrence Carter Long and a number of different activists and actors and media personailities, talking about the popular television show Glee. Which… and it’s somewhat controversial and also in some ways typical misrepresentation of the disability experience and people with disbailities as well as other minoiryt demographics.

TK Small (TK): I should throw in… this is TK Small by the way. I should throw in that the inspiriation, or the idea behind this segment about Glee related to a very powerful blog that I read that talked about the Christmas Episode where there was reference to Tiny Tim, curing disability and all that, and that’s how the segment around Glee came about.

Announcer: And, we just want to… the discussion, as you’ll hear, will unfold, but there are a number of different ways, I mean personally, I like to think of it as one of the reasons people with disabilities don’t get invited to your fun type of parties is because we may have some sort of a reputation of being a bit of a downer and taking the joy out of things and so we want to dedicate tonight’s show before Christmas to doing exactly that with everybody’s favourite t.v. show, Glee. In fact, TK and I were going to try and ruin everybody’s Christmas by doing an a capella version of, I don’t know if it was going to be Holly Jolly Christmas or Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree but we decided to show you all a little bit of mercy. But before we go into that, we wanted… I wanted to point out another friend of ours, who’s actually part of one of the successful clips of our previous show’s discussion of the life of Laura Hershey on her Facebook Page she made a comment about the use of term “lame duck” to discuss the outgoing 111th congree and wndering whether that was somehow denigrating–

TK: Congress or people with disabilities? [laugh]

Announcer: Right, exactly, that’s just the thing, but I wanted to point out for those of you who maybe want to think a little bit differently about the concept of “lame duck” or “disabled waterfowl” in general – differently abled waterfowl in general – that the news is full of the fact that this is a unprecedented successful and effective congress and among other things we should..I think it is most appropriate that one of the most popular songs is “Donning our Gay Apparel” because your Gay Apparel may include a combat helmet, and you can go into battle for the United States army, navy, marines, as well as the coast guard.

TK: I wonder if I would have to tell them that I’m disabled.

Announcer: Yes. I don’t think you do, I think you could just sneak right in.

TK: They don’t have the same rules of people with disabilities?

Announcer: No.

TK: I can hide my wheelchair while I go into the TIme’s Square recruiting station.

Announcer: We don’t generally– We do not ask, and we rarely tell on this show when someone has a disability. That’s one of the calls we get –

TK: That is an illegal question when you go for a job interview. Your employer is not supposed to ask any questions.

Announcer: Hmm. That’s interesting.

TK: Although as an attorney I used to get that all the time when I was applying for jobs. You’d think that the legal firm would know not to ask that question but apparently not.

Announcer: [laugh] Well, in any event, we wanted to make a point of that… that sometimes the disabled waterfowl can be quite effective and just to note the historic passage of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In any event, it is now 9:08, about to be 9:09, and now its time for the news headlines.

[I have not transcribed the news headlines.]

Announcer: And we’re back listening to the Largest Minority on WBAI. And, on tonight’s show, as promised before, we’re going to have a round table discussion about the popular television show Glee, which features, among other people, a character portrayed by an able-bodied actor who is in a wheelchair. In the most recent show which re-aired again last night, he has a Christmas wish granted by gaining one of these new apparatuses which enables him to stand up and walk, and it’s portrayed as kind of a Christmas miracle and it’s extraordinarily patronizing and a lot of people with disabilities found it extremely irritating, including people on our panel.

TK: And if anybody walks up to me on the street and says I should get an exoskeleton and make me walk, I’ll kill them.

Announcer: Well, you’ll have to get a killer exoskeleton first and you know what? Someday they’re going to make it. [TK laughs] And so without further ado, our own Lawrence Carter Long is leading this discussion, and here it is.

[Music - theme song. I'm afraid my hearing problems have come back and I can't hear it clear enough to transcribe it which is unfortunate because I think it sounds awesome, but I don't want to get the words all wrong.]

Lawrence Carter Long (LCL): And you’re listening to the largest minority on 99.5 WBAI and on the internet at WBAI.org. I’m Lawrence Carter Long and we’re here talking today about everbody’s show that they love to hate within the disability community, Glee. With TK Small.

TK: Lawrence, it’s good to have you back.

LCL: It’s good to be back. You know, nobody thought when the pilot episode of Glee premiered back in May of 2009 that the series would become the phenomena it is now. Glee features on-screen performace based numbers which are selected by Ryan Murphy, who gained previous success with the show Nip/Tuck, and aims to maintain balance on the show between show tunes and charted hits. The music with Glee has been a commerical success with over 13 million digital singles sales and 5 million album sales. The series merchandise also includes DVD and BlueRay releases, a Young Adult book series, an iPad appilication, and a Kareoke game for the Wii. During it’s first season Glee received generally favourable reactions from the critics with Metacritics weighted average based on the average rating of 18 critical reviews at 77%. The season was nominated for 19 Emmy awards, 4 Golden Globe awards, 6 Satellite awards and 57 other awards that we won’t get into, with wins in the 2010 Golden Globe award for best t.v. show, musical or comedy, and Emmy awards for Lynch, guest start Neil Patrick Harris, and Murphy’s direction fo the pilot episode. The second season has been nominated for 5 golden globes, including best tv series in comedy as well as a number of nominations for cast members.

But the feel good show is not without its critics, particularly from the disability community. While media reports in such high profile outlets as People Magazine and US Magazine and trade publications like Hollywood Reporter and Variety have centered on the casting of Kevin McHale as paraplegic wheelchair-using Artie, deeper criticisms regarding plot, tone and representation have received minimal coverage in comparison.

With us today on the Largest Minority we have s.e. smith, who is a feminist and a disability rights activists based in Northern California, who rights for the This Ain’t Livin’ blog, and FWD in the Jewish Daily.

s.e. smith (SE): I am, and I should quickly correct you. I do not write for the Jewish Daily FWD, I write for a feminist website also called FWD.

LCL: Feminist website FWD! Thank you for correcting me.

SE: It’s a very common confusion.

LCL: And also with us is Alice Sheppard who is a Dancer with AXIS Dance company based in Northern California. She’s also a disability advocate. Welcome Alice.

Alice Shepard (AS): Hey Lawrence, it’s good to be here.

LCL: We also have Christine Bruno who’s a Disability Advocate, a actor and director, and works for the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts. Welcome Christine.

Christine Bruno (CB): Hello.

LCL: And fresh from the Keith Olbermann show, the co-creator of Arabs Gone Wild [OPENS WITH SOUND], going on tour again, January 20th, starting in NYC to 8 different cities, Maysoon Zayidd. Hello Maysoon.

Maysoon Zayid (MZ): Hello, Lawrence and TK.

LCL: So. Glee! Let’s talk a little bit about the casting side. Everbody wants to talk about the casting first. What’s the problem with casting a non-disabled guy to play a wheelchair user. Come on, it’s acting! Isn’t that what acting’s about?

CB: How long do we have?

SE: Well, I think you have a situation where you have someone who does not have the lived experience of having a spinal cord injury playing it and it’s very obvious to anyone who has such an injurty or knows people who do that he’s playing it very badly.

LCL: So we’ve got some wheelchair users, and we’ve got some disability advocates. What do you mean by “playing it badly”? How do you play disability badly? I mean, all you gotta do is sit in a chair, right?

AS: If it were only that easy. There’s an understanding of embodiment that’s just not physical in McHale’s portrayal of Artie, and for me, what I see is a huge gap between the body and the chair. He doesn’t even understand how to push that thing. There’s a kind of sweet roll that those of us who use manual wheelchairs can find and use and McHale is always shown shoving and pushing. There’s no rhythm, there’s no feel, there’s no understanding of the chair as part of his body.

LCL: Alice, you know of which you speak because you use a chair and you’re a dancer.

AS: I do.

LCL: You tour professionally, you’re a working dancer. In terms of their choreography none of it really shows the kind of work that you’ve done.

AS: That’s right. The choreography shows Artie just sort of waving his arms, bending a body, behding a head. There’s no integration. And the sad thing about it is that McHale is a beautiful dancer, he’s a really gorgeous mover and, you know, he just can’t make it work in the chair.

LCL: Maysoon, you wanted to add something?

MZ: I just I feel like there’s a couple of different problems with the casting of Artie. One is that, as an actor in the disabled community trying to do my own script, which I wrote, I can’t even get directors to screen test me in my own role as a character with cerebral palsy. As I go from producer to producer, director to director, they do not want to give disabled actors a chance to play disabled parts. Not to mention non-disabled roles. So my first problem with Artie is that I simply do not believe that Ryan Murphy exhausted all options in finding a singer who could sing and dance miraculously and gorgeously, that he couldn’t heal. And I think they intentionally chose an able-bodied actor so they could get him out of the chair to sing and dance whenever they wanted. There’s a problem in Hollywood, there’s a problem in television, that is disabled actors are not given a chance to play neutral roles, and we’re also not given a chance to play our own roles, and we think that only someone mimicing it can win an Oscar. I have Cerebral Palsy. I think Daniel Day Lewis’ portrayal in My Left Foot was absolutely disgusting. So what we see and what the other people see are not the same thing. And when Kevin McHale commented “why can he play gay”, it’s not the same thing. Anyone can play gay, but I can’t play Oprah because I’m white. And he should not be–

LCL: So there’s a certain physicality that comes from playing a disabled character that more often than not people get wrong. Now, Christine, why don’t you talk about this. The Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts. What the Alliance does is help casting directrs, teleivison shows, movie production companies, cast disabled actors. And you work as a sort of go-between between the industry and the working professionals. What is it that you see within the Alliance that shows this problem or illustrates this problem.

CB: Well, basically, I was just gonna say exactly what Maysoon said, we have to start there. There are disabled actors who can play that role, first of all, first and foremost. Alice is absolutely right. The portrayal is faulty at best. I’m trying to be diplomatic. We are on radio.

LCL: You don’t have to be diplomatic with us.

CB: So, Alice is right, but before we even go to the portrayal of a non-disabled actor playing that role let’s go where Maysoon just did and there are actors who can play those roles. In my role as a disability advocate we see this every day all day. We get calls for actors, disabled actors, specifically to play disabled roles. We next to never get calls for disabled actors to play non-disabled characters. Sometimes it happens if a disabled actor goes in a “wows” a producer just in general and they say “We have a part we think you would be great for” and it doesn’t matter that they have a disability but that’s very few and far between.

LCL: Let’s talk about… play devil’s advocate for a bit because some criticisms I’ve seen around Glee have been met with basically the statement “They have a character named Becky who has Down Syndrome, who’s part of the cheer-leading squad. So what about Becky?” And in addition to Becky, in May 2010, Zack Weinstein guest-starred on Laryngitis where he basically was there helping Rachel, who had lost her voice. He was there to serve as the inspiration for Rachel and to help her accept her lot in life. So they have hired disabled actors. What’s wrong with that?

SE: And totally … And totally troped stereotypical roles that pretty much evoke every hateful stereotype about people with disabilities imaginable. I mean, the episode with Zach Weinstein we see him lying in a hopsital bed wearing his football jersey longing for everything he’s lost. He’s just there literally as a prop in an inspirational narrative to make non-disabled viewers feel better about how they think about disability.

CB: And I also think, you know, just to jump ahead for a second. First of all let me address really quickly about the point you’ve made about they’ve hired disabled– They have hired some disabled actors. I mean, at the rirsk of again not being diplomatic it’s true that there’s really two disabilities that can’t be portrayed by other than the people who live those disbailities. One is a little person, and the other is usually a person with Down Syndrome, and there are very distinct physical reasons for that. I mean, can they absolutely not be portrayed, I don’t know. Maybe they could in Avatar Land.

LCL: But again you’re taking jobs away from disabled actors.

CB: That’s right. That’s right. But the other thing is the issue that I wanted to address. I’m sorry, your name is s.e. on the phone, is that right?

SE: Yes.

CB: I think that Glee, unfortunately, casting aside, has missed so many opportunities to, for lack of a better word “right the wrong” of casting a non-disabled actor as a disabled character. They could have done so many things with story-lines that they have chosen, knowingly now, not to do. Because they have been put on notice from the disability community, from the Disabled Arts community, from the unions, that while the casting is said and done and there’s nothing we can do about that we’d like to see the ortrayl and the representation of disabled people and the lived experience of disability be more accurate and authentic.

AS: Can I just speak for a second to the audition for the Cheerios that the character Becky gets? This strikes me as possibly being emblematic. There’s a way in which Becky… we don’t actually find out if Becky can or cannot do what the Cheerios require. She’s given the part, or at leat a place on the team because it looks like Lynch takes care of her or feels sympathy for her or uses the fact that she cannot appear to do that, or is made to seem that she can’t do that, so it’s a sort of pity gag in the audition on the show, and it makes me wonder, what did that mean in the actual audition and casting process?

LCL: And I’ve seen people with Down Syndrome who are on cheerleading squads. Anyone can do a search on YouTube and you can find that sort of thing. One of the things that I think that some peole have brought up in criticizing the disability community is “Well, she refuses to coddle her”, right? She sort of has her there and she kind of, you know, doesn’t treat her differently, but the down side of that is she’s not doing the basic things that most of the squad is doing. It creates this dilemma on how to portray disability in a way that emphasies both honesty and accuracy over sentimentality and false messages, and I think that’s what you’re getting with the Becky character.

MZ: Can I also just interject before I leave, because I have to run, unfortunately, even though that’s difficult for me to physically do. I also feel like growing up in the states watching movies as a child was really traumatic for me, because I was always watching characters who were either healed or pathetic, and Glee is continuing that saga of either the character has to be pathetic with the one goal in life, finding anyone so charitable as to love them, because no one can love someone who’s disabled unless they also heal them. Or, watching people who couldn’t walk on screen suddenly in heels strolling down the red carpet. Glee is definitely trying to bill itself as a show for the youth and it’s yet another place where people look and go “Oh, I guess I can’t become an actor. I guess I can’t do anything. Maybe if I was just Downs they’d give me a chance.”

LCL: So the sense here–

MZ: I’m a comedian by the way, sorry.

LCL: So when we talk about the Artie character, on Dream On. Let’s talk a bit about specific episodes. We’ve got the major plot line in Dream On, where Artie begins doing research on new treatment and he starts to get hopeful that one day yes, he’ll be able to be able to be quote unquote “a real dancer”, that he’ll get out of the chair and dnace around. This suggests a theme of empowerment, that people with obstacles should not be deterred from their ambitions, yadda yadda, but the guidance counsellor tells Artie that his hopes of walking again are unrealistic and he should plan on talking to her on a regular basis and it sort of focuses. So the message that it seems to me that this sends to disabled viewers is not that there are real disabled dancers, using chairs aside, but because of one’s disabilities, your dreams are impossible.

TK: And Lawrence, it might be helpful for our listeners to explain that Alice, sitting righ tnext to you, is practically having a conipution fit as you describe this.

LCL: I thought that was part of her condition [laughter]

SE: I’m not in the studio but if I was you would see me having a small conipution fit myself. I thought the message of that episode was people who use chairs A) never get out of chairs, part time wheelchair users are never acknowledged as existing ever, and b) can never hope to do anything. That’s, like, a huge slap in the face to the disabled dance community to be told that wheelchair users can’t dance in that episode. I mean…

AS: Truly, absolutely. And the thing that really really catches me is one move, the one thing that really could… Aaron Fotheringham is the disabled stunt artist and he pulls that awesome one rear-wheel wheely. I mean, the irony of hiring a disabled stunt artist to actually execute the role of a non-disabled actor. It bites. It just… bites.

LCL: So adding insult to injury.

AS: It did.

LCL: By hiring somebody who can actually pull the move off play the stunt double when it came time to film the episode.

SE: And if you saw any of the press for Wheels, the producers were acting like they had invented this super cool new thing called “Wheelchair Dancing”.

CB: Yes they were.

LCL: There’s no acknowledgement of things like AXIS or Dancing Wheels or CanDoCo or any of the companies who have been out there an in existence for decades.

CB: I mean, they didn’t even look. Not only did they not have a wheelchair dance consultant on the set. Those articles came out, I remember there was one in the Daily News that was sort of framed in this “ha ha, isn’t this sort of funny that we all thought this was going to be easy and simple and then when we tried to wheel up on the ramps in the set we fell over and hit our heads.” [Here's an example in the NY Post]

LCL: You’re talking about the other cast members in the show.

CB: Yes, the other cast members in the show. In an effort to, and I’m using little quote marks with my fingers in the studio, in an effort to “identify” with Artie’s “plight” as it were, they thought they would stick themselves in wheelchairs and try to dance. But, you know, I want to bring up something that I have heard in my role as disability advocate in the Alliance, the pushback, from the producers, and the creative team on Glee is that, “Okay. So now here we are, we’ve created this diverse group of Gleeclub members, one of whom includes is a character with a disability. You complain complain complain that you don’t see any characters with disabilities on t.v. here now, we’ve given you one, and you’re still complaining.” And let me point out that they’ve won a diversity waward for Glee. So–

LCL: Who gave them that diversity award? Come on, let’s call ‘em out. They gave them award.

CB: I’m not going there.

LCL: They get the criticism.

SE: I’m hitting the internet, I gotta tell ya. The other thing, speaking of the so-called diversity of the show, (while looking this up very quickly) if you look at the other cast members you have [?] Mercedes– [this gets really disjointed in the recording. se mentions the fat activist community] what is going on with Lauren Zizes, you have stutters who are furious about the decision to fake Tina’s stutter, and the gay community is not that stoked on Kurt’s storyline either.

LCL: So this is not restricted to the disability community in general.

CB: Except I have heard good things about the portrayal of the gay narrative. I’ve heard good things about it, only because that’s the one that’s the most well-rounded at the moment.

SE: It’s the most well-played and I think it’s because Ryan Murphy and Chris Colfer have that experience. The award came from the Multi-Cultural Motion Picture Association. I also note it’s been recognized by a Television with a Conscious award, which– some of us disagree on, and that would be from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

LCL: So, I think, it points out one of the problems that we get into in doing criticism or having honest criticism of a show like Glee is when people push back, they’ll say, “Hey, wait a minute!” and try and ignore these criticisms that are more in depth about these questionable areas of depiciton and try and reduce the conversation to “you’re just mad they didn’t used disabled actors” instead of really engaging in what advocates are saying and what the people doing those critiques are saying.

SE: Well, it gets back to “any representation is good representation!” complaint, and I think most members of minority groups say “No, the tropes and stereotypical representation is harmful.” And most of the messages that Glee sends about disabilities are actively damaging to the disability community, whether there are disabled or non-disabled actors.

CB: Yes, and that’s sort of the point I was making. Yes, from our point of view, and from the disabled actor point of view, and the disabled person’s point of view, they made a mistake by casting Kevin McHale. From our point of view, but they cold be taking active steps to use these as teaching moments, and really portraying the lived experience as it exists, even with Kevin McHale in the role, if they hired consultants, if they had scripts that were… the accurate portrayal of what we live with everyday. I could live with that a little more than this continuing of the myths and assumptions and perceptions of people with disabilities, and how we live.

LCL: And let’s talk about the common threads within those misconceptions. One of the common misconceptions that get played out over and over and over again on Glee is that Artie seems to be focused on walking agian. He’s only going to be happy if he walks again, and they has been shown now on a third episode, even so far as having a dream sequence where he does get out of the wheelchair and is dancing around with himself [YouTube link to live performance by McHale]. I mean, those things we see over and over again, and again on the Christmas episode which sparked this converastion. He gets the ability to use this machine that costs million of dollars and is not going to be available to anybody, this exoskelton which affords him the ability to wlak again, which he does. [?]

[?] The whole Christopher Reeve thing.

[laughter, agreement]

AS: [These whole section is completely incomprehensible to me. What I caught out of it was about Tina and Artie breaking up, something to do with Mike Chang, and then his girlfriend giving him the ability to walk] a kind of emasculation in the protrayal of disability there.

SE: [Something else incomprehensible] The implication is that everybody’s mocking Brittney for being stupid for believing in Santa Claus and her perceived stupidity is a kind of a running joke in the series which definitely makes me uncomfortable in the “dumb blonde stereotype”, that only Brittney would be stupid enough to think that Santa could give him the ability to walk again.

LCL: And it’s played again as comedy. So, as the show that positions itself, and the producers have certainly done this time and time again when the critisims have been brought out, as a quote unquote “progressive show” with a message, and we’ve talked about how that’s not really the case with any of the characters, and I like to get into that a little bit. Why is it perceived as a progressive show? If it’s a show that depicts minorities through a majority lens – I mean, we’ve got non-disabled actors and writers handling a disabled characters, we’ve got white folks writing for Black and Asian folks. Maybe the exception to this rule is Kurt, Ryan Murphy’s alter-ego, why do you think that most people, despite these criticisms, have continued to laud it or applaud it as a progressive show?

SE: Because it’s the majority that gets to decide whether or not it’s progressive. If you compare reviews of Wheels, which got a lot of press, you see a lot of non-disabled people praising the show for sensitive, honest depiction of disability that shows you what it’s like, and you saw a huge swath of the disability community going “Um… no”.

[Multiple: No.]

SE: So, I feel like the dominant majority is– those are the people writing the pressers and giving out the awards and getting to decide what is progressive or not, and it’s notable that a show written and performed through a majority lens, so it’s nice and safe and comfortable for progressives, is [unclear].

LCL: So i’s a safe kind of portrayal, it’s a cookie-cutter form of progressive, it’s something that allows the viewers and the writers and producers feel better about themselves.

CB: That’s right.

TK: As a disbaility rights activists that does not come from the right side of this issue, that’s what I find so insidious about this type of program, because where the vast majority of able-bodied people get their understanding of disability is through this stupid show.

CB That’s right.

LCL: If it’s reinforcing or reiterating the kind of non-sense people already believe, we’re not going to get beyond that.

TK: Which further leads to “it’s better to be dead than to be disabled“, and forces people to make horrific terrible decisions, like going to somebody like Kevorkian for physician-assisted suicide, because the idea of being disabled is just too scary.

AS: And we’re right back at Million Dollar Baby.

CB: That’s what saddens me and perpelexes me so much about this particular show. I thnk TK is right. It’s really insidious because of its position right now in the American vocabulary and how popular it is. It has so much opportunity to do so much good for so many under-represented groups. And you know what? Audiences are smart. They’ll swallow what you give them if its believable. I blame the producers for taking cheap shots and being lazy. Lazy lazy lazy.

LCL: I think most producers probably are lazy. You don’t see a lot of new things coming out of network t.v.; that’s my own critique. Maybe sometimes on cable. There’s Breaking Bad.

SE: Or Friday Night Lights, yes.

LCL: In terms of their portrayal of disability. I would wonder, why do you think that those push backs on, you know, the disability centered critiques have been done on Glee. s.e., I know when we were communicating about the show and doing this program, you said that you received rape threats, death threats, and all sorts of things for critiquing the show and actually writing about it on the blog, people calling you r#tard and all sorts of things. What do you think, and what do others here think, is so scary about people with disabilities challenging the depictions of us in pop culture and mass media?

SE: We’re making the narrative messy. I have had a piece on Glee go up at the Guardian over the summer, and that’s where probably the majority of the rape threats came from; they’re very friendly over there in the comments I must say. What I found is that people have a very simplistic, sacchrine view of disability that Glee reinforces for them, and things get really complicated when you start talking about things like, say, wheelchair users who dance and actually don’t spend every waking moment wishing they could walk again. It deconstructs the narrative to find out that we’re individuals who experience our disability differently. Some of us may hate them, some of us may love them, and people don’t like having their views of minorities complicated that way.

LCL: That;s more nuanced, that takes a lot more work as an audience. You can’t just sit by and passively watch the show, you might actually have to think about it.

SE: You have to engage with it.

LCL: I just wanted to, before we go a little bit further, I just need to say you’re listening to a very special edition of the Largest Minority radio show, on WBAI. I did say that with a wink and a nod just so everybody knows.

AS: Thank you, Lawrence, I’ve always wanted to be special.

CB: I am special.

SE: Where’s Tiny Tim, that’s what I want to know.

LCL: That’s actually not very far, let’s talk about the Christmas episode. It’s actually not very far from Tiny Tim, is it?

ALL: No.

SE: No it is not.

AS: Not being fully aware of all of the American traditions, can somebody just remind me of that movie, is it Miracle on 34th Street–

CB: Which, Tiny Tim?

AS: No, the t.v. movie that plays every year around the holiday season about miracles and the Christmas season.

CB: You mean all of them?

AS: Yes, all of them, oh, It’s a Wonderful Life, that one!

SE: There’s a lot of telvision about that.

AS: And so the thing that really gets me about the Very Special Christmas Episode is this is directly in that tradition. It’s a direct continuation of Christian narrative about sin, illness, miracles, disabilities, healing and cure. It’s that holiday time, we’re right there. I can’t believe they went there, and they did.

LCL: So, right with your eggnog and your fruit cake, you get a cure narrative.

AS: You don’t get a cure narrative, you get… it’s very interesting to me that they don’t heal him, they don’t cure him, they just make him walk. It’s flying a very careful edge, I want to be careful and say it’s not a cure narrative, it’s miraculous.

CB: It’s a miracle.

LCL: So we get the Christmas miracle.

AS: But we don’t get the cure.

SE: And note that the preson who is rewarded in this narrative is the believer, which is a very old Judeo-Christian concept. Everbody mocks the person who believes and in the end she is redeemed for her faith.

LCL: So let me ask you this. We’ve gone around and I want to make sure that everyone, if they have burning questions or burning comments about the show, but I would ask, first, as a contrast, what are some of the things that you’ve either seen, or would like to see, regarding depictions of disablity that we haven’t quite seen yet. What are the options, what are the alternatives, to the kind of things that we’re seeing on Glee that we’re pushing back against and we’d like to see alternatives to?

CB: Lawrence, I just want to say one thing about, it speaks to that, but I’m not giving an example. In July, I participated in a day-long conference with the unions, with AFTRA and SAG, called Lights Camera Access.

LCL: Tell people what AFTRA is.

CB: Oh, it’s the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. I participated in a day long conference with AFRTA and SAG.

LCL: And this was in Hollywood.

CB: This was in Hollywood at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

LCL: The folks who do the Oscars.

CB: Yes, the Emmys, I think. And Glee, the producers of Glee, Ryan Murphy et al, were invited to the table as one of the panels was “best practices”, so we had representatives there from Breaking Bad, and –

LCL: Breaking Bad showed up, Brothers showed up.

CB: I mean, it was amazing, and basically they were talking about their experience in making television with disabled characters and disabled story lines–

LCL: And you even had people from Family Guy.

CB: Yeah, Family Guy showed up.

LCL: So if the cartoon cahracters can join–

CB: Yeah, we did.

SE: And Seth McFarlane is not known for progressiveness.

CB: No!

LCL: Right, but he was willing to have the conversation which says something about him in relation to the producers of Glee.

CB: Right, yes, and it was a very conscious decision on the organizer’s part to ask Ryan Murphy and the other producers of Glee to come to the table. And they chose not to. I don’t know if there was any response or if they just ignored the request but that to me is very telling. That to me tells me that there is something they’re not doing that they know they should be doing that other people are doing successfully. There is no denying that Breaking Bad is incredibly successful and the way that they’ve handled the storyline with RJ Mitte is amazing because it’s understated and it just is part of the fabric of the show.

LCL: Right, so rather that have a converastion with people who know something about the topic, and can have a focused discussin about the issue and take it a step further it seems they might be more inclined sticking with people who don’t know anything about these issues and enforcing the narrative–

CB: That’s right. And we’re tired of preaching to the converted. I mean, we’re all sitting here, all of us here are sitting in the room talking about these things that we talk to each other about all day every day. It would have been nice to have someone like Ryan Murphy sharing practices that those people, like the Breaking Bad people, sharing their best practices with those who could learn something. But, it didn’t happen.

TK: We need to know where he goes to get coffee and just dog him with scripts and ideas and real gimps doing real things.

LCL: Hey, we can sing, we can dance.

SE: I would note too that Glee has actively thumbed its nose at critics. The embedded meta commentary that you see in various episodes, and especially from Mercedes, tends to be kind of the voice of that, but I mean they’ve basically out and out insulted the disability community with some of the lines in the episodes that are basically, I think there’s one eisode where Mercedes basically says “Oh, tee hee, I’m not suposed to do that, am I, because it’s not PC.”

LCL: Oh, right, she was talking about her, and something, she was talking about Artie and she used Handi-Capable or something like that.

CB? AS?: Ha.

SE: So Glee is obviously hearing us, they just don’t care.

LCL: They’ll do the meta-narrative inside the show, critiquing us, but without us actually being at the table. That whole handicapable is bizarre to me because it sounds like a kitchen utensil. It slices, it dices, it makes fries, but it doesn’t really describe us, the real humans tied in to the issues we’re talking about. So, what would you like to see? What is something that you’ve seen? it is the Christmas season, what would you like to see, on a high note, or what have you seen, and what would you like to see more of? Is there enough out there?

SE: More depictions of disability where it’s not the central focus of the character. I mean, I think you have.. oddly enough, and if everbody here watches Private Practice because I think Doctor Fife is a great example of a character who happens to be disabled.

CB: Yes he is.

LCL: There was another character who was back on ER who did a similar thing, back when ER was on.

CB:Who?

LCL: The woman who was post-polio.

CB: Oh yeah, Dawn. That was short-lived. There’s another one and it just went out of my head.

SE: Bonnie on Jerico, played by Shoshannah Stern, is another great character, she actually– she auditioned for a non-disabled role and they liked her so much that they brought her on and made the character deaf, which I thought was so awesome.

CB: CSI.

LCL: CSI with Robert Davis Boel’s character, who is always there. I know shows like Weeds had Linda Bovine as the social worker, and Shosanna in the first season. Basically it’s not described or gone into details about her disability at all, just showing them.

AS: Or even the Private Practice guy.

CB: Yeah, she just said– Oh, she can’t hear. Alice doesn’t have headphones so she didn’t hear what you just said.

LCL: We said Family Guy earlier, what about South Park? Can you do edgy and do disability?

TK: Edgy is good.

LCL: Edgy is good, we can do edgy.

SE: Edgy is good, especially when it’s coming from disabled people who are owning their own experiences.

LCL: I think we saw that even in Family Guy when we had the character with Down Syndrome who was portrayed by a young woman who actually has Down Syndrome. There have bene these steps taken throughout the industry but we haven’t seen shows with the profile or notoriety of Glee taking something on board.

SE: I think something else I would lik to see, Glee’s handling of mental illness is absolutely deplorable. For the most part pop culture depictions of mental illness makes me actually want to throw things at the television.

CB: Yes.

SE: It is so very rarely done at all well, and pretty much every stereotype you can possibly imagine about people with mental ilness being dangerous and scary and sexually promiscuousness and every thing just get thrrown at us,and very rarely do I see out, proud, capable mentally ill characters.

CB: I will say one thing abot the United States of Tara, which is on Showtime, oh I don’t know if anybody has seen this show, but it is about a woman who has DID and they are very proactive. They are proactive in their marketing of really protraying mental illness in an authentic way. They have on their website a lot of information about DID and where people can go to find infomraiton and they have a consultant on the show as a regular employee, all of the time, so I think if you’re going to talk about mental illness you really have to do right, and I think the’re a show doing their due diligence.

SE: I think Six Feet Under, when it was airing, had some really rocky patches wit mental illness, but at other times the depictions were very honest and real, especially, I’m re-watching it right now. In the third season there’s a storyline with Vanessa having depression that I think was done really really well.

LCL: We’ve gotta wrap it up now. Are there any final thoughts you want people going away with, either thinking feeling or doing regarding Glee and Disability on t.v.?

CB: Don’t watch.

LCL: SE, why don’t we start with you first.

SE: Oh gosh. You know, honestly, the outcome I would like from Glee… I would like to talk to Ryan Murphy personally about what he’s doing, and I’d really like him to come to the table with members of the disability community to have serious conversation with representatives of the disabled actors, disabled dancers, to talk about how damaging Glee is and how to fix it. I mean, the show is still airing. It got a renewal for another season. There is time to turn this bus of sadness around.

LCL: That’s your Christmas wish, we’ll sit down with SE and Ryan Murphy. We’ll have TK moderate. Alice?

AS: I want them in the audience for one AXIS show, and then I want their minds completey opened. Short of that, we have to keep watching as a community, we have to keep talking and writing and calling and sharing and pressing because that’s the way change happens.

LCL: So, it’s a popular show, don’t give up on it.

AS: Keep up the fight.

LCL: Christine.

CB: I’d like to see them really meet with some disabled actors and really entertain the thought of casting disabled actors and just listening to the lived experience of what it’s like to be an actor with disability, with other people in the room so at least if they’re not going to cast disabled actors, whatever, they’re doing what they do right.

LCL: So we can do something with a disabled characters so they’re not just stuck in a box the entire episode.

CB: That’s right, change the narrative, please.

LCL: Alright. This is Lawrence Carter Long, TK Small.

TK: I’m really impressed with the conversation we’ve had here. What I’ve taken away from this is there’s important work being done. It may not be possible to fix Glee, but I do believe through advocacy and script writing, and the ideas of performers with disabilities taking on ownership of the craft and the art, and the presentation itself, that positive things will come out of it.

LCL: Thank you, and I think that’s what we’re all hoping to achieve here.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.
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Book Review: Lasting Treasures by Julie Ellis

Chally — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:00:44 +0000

This piece contains lots of spoilers.

I wanted to love this book, I really did. I have enjoyed the couple of Julie Ellis novels I’ve read, but this one just tipped the charming/not happening scale a bit far. It has a really strong heroine in Vicky, who escapes the Russian pogroms to build a new life in America, trying to negotiate a difficult family situation and life as a prominent businesswoman. But there are lots of issues in this book that really grated, for example, every time a black servant is given an order, Ellis always points out how they were delighted to do it.

I’d just like to focus on the disability issues for now, though. There are many, not least with the disability-as-punishment trope cropping up at the end when the antagonist of the piece, Vicky’s son, has a stroke and is paralysed. He’s then housed in the cottage in which his mentally ill father shot himself. The very same cottage in which he kept Vicky while pretending she had a mental illness because he didn’t like the direction in which his mother was taking the company. Yep, it’s a bit of an intense novel.

But what I really want to talk about is the characterisation of Anita Roberts. Anita is married to Mark, a man Vicky falls in love with. So, naturally, she has to be a deceptive, evil shrew because that is the way “the other woman” gets sympathy in romance fiction. Except, she’s a wheelchair user, so it gets a lot more… interesting.

At first, Anita is set up as a martyr, the victim of a tragic accident who is doted on by her charming husband. They are a ‘special couple,’ Vicky is given to understand, and Anita is the darling of their social circle. As it turns out, she’s shrewd and conniving. She uses the excuse of the accident to deny her husband sex, even though the doctors said that they could have an ‘almost normal sex life’! It turns out that Anita never really wanted sex before the accident either, and now her horrible cruelty of not wanting sex has been unleashed! How terrible! It couldn’t possibly be the case that Anita doesn’t owe Marc sex, and she has become confident enough in herself to not engage with a sexual life she doesn’t really want. No, indeed. It is all about Marc’s pain and setting up his affair with Vicky. Anita’s not wanting sex gets to be the strange part, gets to be part of her evil scheme against poor Marc.

So, we’ve got the good crip who turns out to be hiding a deeply bitter and nasty nature. That’s old hat. But it was quite something to see that set up with a gendered aspect, too. Anita’s out to disparage Marc’s achievements and interests constantly, and she forces him to do ‘whatever she asks’ because otherwise he’s a terrible husband to his tragically beautiful and “damaged” wife. I suggest we identify a new trope, the Bad Shrewish Crip. The perfect mix of misogyny and ableism, out now at a bookstore near you.

But I really start to grit my teeth when we bring Anita’s Jewishness into it, because she perfectly fits the JAP stereotype. The Jewish American Princess is held to be a nagging, high maintenance woman with expensive taste and no sense of how irritating she is. And Anita is a JAP all over: she pokes fun at Vicky for having been a maid, loves designer clothing, and ends up forcing her husband to move to London as it is the only ‘civilised’ city on Earth. She’s simply set up as the most horrible conglomeration of disability, gender and racial/ethnic/cultural/religion stereotyping I have encountered in quite some time. The Bad Shrewish Jewish Crip, maybe?

So, in short: wanted to like it, feel kind of bad saying this because I like the author, but for goodness’ sake, this was one of the more frustrating reads of my year, and that is really saying something.

How Can We Get More Bilingual Health Care Providers?

abby jean — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:51:32 +0000

Los Angeles County, where I live, is incredibly diverse, both racially and linguistically. According to the Asian Pacific American Legal Center’s 2008 report on Language Diversity and English Proficiency in LA County (pdf file), more than half of Los Angeles County residents speak a language other than English at home. “The 10 most frequently spoken languages countywide are: English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, Vietnamese, Farsi, Japanese and Russian.” The report lists 39 distinct languages and almost 10,000 residents speak another language not on the list. About 29% of county residents are Limited English Proficient (LEP), which means they have some degree of difficulty communicating in English.

All of these people will have some contact with the health care system at some point in their lives and ideally, at more than one point. And, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, having a health care provider who speaks the same language as the patient has lots of important benefits to patient care (internal cites omitted):

A growing body of literature finds that language concordance between patients and providers (i.e., both speak the patient’s primary language well) results in greater patient understanding, leading to increased satisfaction, better medication adherence, greater understanding of diagnoses and treatment, greater well-being and better functioning for persons with chronic disease, and more health education.

The report goes on to note that only some of these problems can be mitigated by having the conversation interpreted. Using an interpreter can also disrupt the human connection between provider and patient and curtail full discussion. Interpretation, no matter how competent, is somewhat cumbersome and inefficient. This all means that having the health care provider be bilingual is by far the best solution, both for patients and providers. And often, cultural conceptions of health issues like pain, disability, and mental illness can be very important in understanding how a patient is describing symptoms or experiences, so a native speaker is the best.

The problem, of course, is that not all health care providers are bilingual. This means those who can speak another language are relatively valuable, so they can be more exclusive or take more high-paying jobs. If you are a patient who can afford to pay high rates or has great insurance, you may be able to get a provider who speaks your language, but you’re not guaranteed. And if you are a poorer patient and rely on emergency rooms and county health clinics for care, you just have to hope to get lucky. As I once heard it put, “If you’re a Cambodian therapist, you can basically write your own ticket. You’re not going to work at the County Department of Mental Health.”

So how can we go about getting more bilingual health providers, especially for relatively low-paying jobs to care for low-income patients? There’s no obvious answer. Here are some ideas, and their potential drawbacks:

Require all health care providers to become fluent in another language. Providers all go through some training and licensing procedures, so we could build in a language requirement. There are some obvious difficulties – how would we ensure languages were proportionally represented? would we match providers to areas where there was a need for the language they spoke? how do we make sure someone learns, say, Hmong? would the cost of administering all those language proficiency tests be better spent elsewhere in the health care system? It also doesn’t serve our goal of having providers be native speakers.
Recruit more native speakers of non-English languages to become health care providers. This could take a lot of different forms – scholarships and incentives for these people to enter training programs or medical schools, reaching out to younger kids to stimulate interest in health care professions, providing tutoring or other support resources, or a number of other methods. Most of these things would take a very long time before they resulted in a change in the makeup of health care providers. It’s also unclear how effective any of these methods are, and how much they cost.
One possible solution is always to throw money at it. We could dedicate a lot of funding to paying big salaries for providers who speak other languages. While that would probably work, and relatively quickly, it would cost a lot of money. And would continue to cost a lot of money to maintain. And, most importantly, would not do anything to increase the total number of health care providers who teach non-English languages and if more were induced to enter the profession because of the high salaries, it would cost more and more money over time. To compensate, there would be fewer and fewer health care providers overall, or some other significant effect on the health care system from the significantly shrinking resources.

Personally, I support a little bit of all three. (Equivocation is a policy-maker’s prerogative.) Increasing incentives for health care professionals to know and learn non-English languages, aggressive recruiting for native non-English speakers to become health care professionals, and paying bonuses or other incentives to bilingual providers. To make the best of the current situation, I also support training interpreters and ensuring they’re used appropriately.

Are there other policies you think would help the problem?

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: The Awkward Lines of -ist Language

Ouyang Dan — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:45:51 +0000

[The scene sets with OYD, a slightly pale yet never-the-less still quite indigenous woman, sitting down to her trusty Macbook Pro, a laptop named "Lappy", who has seen better days. She sets down and opens up her "drafts" tab under FWD/Forward, where she notices that egads! she has been working on this book review for over a month, and Oh my! how it must have been a long time since she has completed one. She cracks her "double jointed" knuckles like she does it too often, tucks a strand of brown hair behind her ear. She drags the review out of "drafts", dusts it off, reaches for anything caffeinated, and begins to type.]

I like media where I can consume it, enjoy it, and get a sense that I am experiencing something that touches on experiences that are my own, that seems real to me with out over-exaggerating them (mostly). I also enjoy it when certain traits about characters are touched upon as a description, as part of who that character is, but then they are not brought up as Huge Deals throughout the entirety of the book.

These are a few things that really endeared Alexie Sherman’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to me. Sherman created a protagonist “Junior”, who was born into the world with several oppressions, living on the axis of poverty, race, and disability. Within the first few pages of the book Junior gives a pretty good run down of how each of these things affects his life, and has always affected his life from the moment he was born. From never having quite enough to eat, to the way his “grease on the brain” has given him a stutter and seizures.

But that is where Alexie leaves the discussion about Junior’s disability. It is just a part of him, a description of his character. It isn’t some great obstacle he has to overcome. His disability isn’t some plot point, and it doesn’t help the other people around him become inspired about trying harder or appreciating their lives more. In fact, he goes into great detail early on, in those first few pages, to explain that the reservation kids often bully him. From an excerpt on NPR:

You wouldn’t think there is anything life threatening about speech impediments, but let me tell you, there is nothing more dangerous than being a kid with a stutter and a lisp.

A five-year-old is cute when he lisps and stutters. Heck, most of the big-time kid actors stuttered and lisped their way to stardom.

And, jeez, you’re still fairly cute when you’re a stuttering and lisping six-, seven-, and eight-year-old, but it’s all over when you turn nine and ten.

After that, your stutter and lisp turn you into a retard.

And if you’re fourteen years old, like me, and you’re still stuttering and lisping, then you become the biggest retard in the world.

Everybody on the rez calls me a retard about twice a day. They call me retard when they are pantsing me or stuffing my head in the toilet or just smacking me upside the head.

I’m not even writing down this story the way I actually talk, because I’d have to fill it with stutters and lisps, and then you’d be wondering why you’re reading a story written by such a retard.

Do you know what happens to retards on the rez?

We get beat up.

At least once a month.

Yep, I belong to the Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club.

Sure I want to go outside. Every kid wants to go outside. But it is safer to stay at home. So I mostly hang out alone in my bedroom and read books and draw cartoons.

Then, he moves leaves it there. We know he deals with these things as part of his life, but they do not define his life. Even the most horrible and hurtful parts of his life with disability are not defining his life.

Some other things that are not defined by Junior’s particular disability:

His grades in school — He does well in school, and this point becomes part of the main plot, so I won’t give too much away for anyone who plans to read this book.
His ability to participate in sports — Junior plays many sports, including contact sports. He is a good basketball player, playing on the school’s team.
His ability to have romantic relationships — Despite his believing how shallow it is, Junior has a girlfriend, and as it turns out, she actually likes him! Imagine that!

The other aspect of this book that I enjoyed, though I don’t expect every reader to view the same way, is that the Indian Reservation depicted has a lot of truth to it from my own experiences of having grown up on and around my own as a girl. Twenty, and even ten years ago, our reservation life was not so far off from the one described here, with the exception of perhaps the climate being slightly different, and perhaps I was too young to understand and remember anything about crime rates. But there was poverty, and then there was crushing poverty where I am from. There was alcoholism, though I would venture that perhaps it wasn’t the hot-button stereotype that I feel is portrayed at times in Alexie’s book. I don’t know. Every Native community is different, for sure, with their own unique set of problems. While I feel that there is a lot of truth to what Sherman Alexie has created, I also feel that there is a sweeping generalization. So, it hits and it misses, and I would encourage you to read it for yourself and decide what you think.

There are a lot of instances of language that I would not recommend in a progressive or social change setting going on here in this book. I see it being useful and very much achieving its purpose, for example, there is a very racist joke told by a white boy that Junior meets on his first day of school, using the “n”, which I will not repeat, but which is disparaging to Natives and Black people alike. Junior demonstrates an intolerance for it, without missing a beat, and in Junior’s point of view, the kid respects him for it. But, I have to wonder, is it because of how Junior addresses it, or because this particular student realizes that what he said was hurtful and wrong? The demonstration of how wrong racism is in YA literature is something I want to see more, but I question, sometimes, the ways in which we see it handled. There is almost no discussion or consideration of why this is wrong, just the very visceral use of very hateful words (like above, with the use of the “r” word in so casual a context). Just like using rape as a metaphor to show that a “bad” guy is bad, I don’t need to see or read -ist language for shock value to confront -isms. However, a well placed word could have the proper effect if viewed through the proper lens, but I don’t know if that is quite so obvious here. Junior simply reacts, saying he has to defend Black people, and Indians, but he doesn’t go into much else.

I will also note on the Wise White Person, or WWP, as I will. It takes a WWP living on the rez to point out all of Junior’s problems early on, and essentially Save Him! from the Rotten Destitution! Without a WWP, why poor Junior might be dead, the victim of a trailer fire started by grease from frybread, helplessly drunk and passed out.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is an excellent book, worth reading, for many reasons, but I caution you, gentle readers, there are many themes addressed, in very direct and raw ways that I am still not sure that I wholly approve of, and yet, as a non-white, Native American, woman, with a disability, I am not fully sure that fully disapprove of all of them either.

Oh, except for the sexist language. I found no use for that at all. I found no point where that taught any lesson, except where young boys were using it to show that “Hey! Women and girls’ bodies are weak, so calling you a woman or a girl body part means you are weak! Har har!” You get no points there, Alexie. Misogyny wins again! Whee!

Deportation by Default, Part Two: United States Wrongfully Deports Disabled Citizen

s.e. smith — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:17:19 +0000

In July, a study was released discussing disabled immigrants and revealing some alarming facts about who is in immigration detention in the United States. I wrote about it here, and the numbers were pretty astounding. The study uncovered the fact that 15% of the people in immigration detention in the United States had disabilities that impaired their ability to understand immigration proceedings. They were unable to defend themselves in court and unable to understand their legal rights. Some were kept for years in detention while officials debated what to do with them.

Immigration law is one of the most tangled areas of law in the United States. The system is complex and labyrinthine and it’s extremely difficult to navigate. It’s even harder when you’ve been held in detention for weeks, months, or years and you’ve been provided with inadequate care; being in confinement is stressful, and can exacerbate mental illness for some people, making it even more challenging to make your way through the court system. The ACLU set out some immediate demands in their report to get better protections for disabled detainees; as far as I know, those demands have not been met.

The report also documented cases of US citizens with disabilities who were deported because they were the wrong colour and they were unable to defend themselves in court. Just last week, I read a followup on a case I discussed; the American Civil Liberties Union is suing on behalf of Mark Lyttle, who was deported and left to fend for himself in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala for four months before he was able to get assistance from a US embassy. This case has been dragging on for over a year.

Lyttle is of Puerto Rican descent, but he’s lived in the United States his whole life. He only speaks English. The government knew this when they deported him:

The U.S. government admitted in April that it had wrongly deported an N.C. native, but newly released documents show that federal investigators ignored FBI records and other evidence showing that the man was a United States citizen.

At the time of Mark Lyttle’s deportation, immigration officials had criminal record checks that said he was a U.S. citizen. They had his Social Security number and the names of his parents. They had Lyttle’s own sworn statement that he had been born in Rowan County. (source)

His story started when he was briefly jailed for ‘behavioural problems’ in a home for people with mental illness. Officials referred his case to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) despite being aware that he was a US citizen. ICE detained him, investigated, denied him legal counsel, and deported him to Mexico.

As he drifted homeless and penniless through Central America, he was unable to access the medications he was taking to treat his mental illness. Unstable environments contributed to a deterioration of his mental state. He considered suicide. He was imprisoned by multiple sets of officials and deported a second time when he managed to re-enter the United States. Finally, after reaching an embassy, his family was contacted and he was brought safely back into the United States.

There are layers of problems with this case. There’s the documented issue that ICE fails to serve people with disabilities in immigration detention, making it impossible for undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and wrongfully detained citizens alike to make their way through immigration proceedings; it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to self-represent in immigration court, let alone someone who is disabled, isolated, frightened, and not getting adequate care. It’s clear that a better system needs to be put in place to screen people when they enter detention so they can be provided with adequate services, if we are going to be detaining people at all.

And there’s the problem, not restricted to people with disabilities, of deporting people simply because they appear to be undocumented immigrants. If you have brown skin, if you ‘look Mexican,’ whether or not you are, whether or not you have documentation, there is a potential risk of deportion. ICE raids in workplaces across the country have swept up legal immigrants along with US citizens, including some people who have never been outside the US. Despite ample documentation, these people have been deported. Because they look wrong.

Cesar Ramirez Lopez, a San Pablo truck driver, won a $10,000 settlement in 2007 after he was held for four days by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents even after his lawyer convinced ICE investigators that he was a citizen.

…

Rennison Castillo, a Washington state man who was born in Belize but took his oath of citizenship while serving in the U.S. Army in 1998, who spent seven months in an ICE prison in 2006. He is suing the government with the help of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle.

…

Some longtime observers of the immigration agency say that, while citizens make up a tiny fraction of the roughly 400,000 people who pass through ICE custody each year, such cases occur with some regularity. The problem is exacerbated, they say, by the fact that immigration detainees, unlike those in the criminal justice system, lack the right to legal counsel and other due process protections. (source)

One of the cornerstones of the legal system in the United States is supposed to be the premise that people are innocent until proven guilty. Yet, in the case of deportation proceedings, people are…guilty until deported. Denial of basic legal rights to people in immigration detention is a travesty and a human rights violation. People are intimidated into complying with deportation proceedings:

The young man was bullied into signing a form authorizing his voluntary deportation, except that it wasn’t made clear to Delgado that by affixing his John Hancock he was okaying being shipped off to Mexico. His belief was that he would be allowed to return home in Houston if he just did as he was told. (source)

This is a problem that goes far beyond the issues with disabled detainees in particular. The current state of our immigration system is a travesty that needs to be addressed; it is a foreign policy issue, it is a human rights problem, it is a fundamental violation of everything the United States claims to stand for. Providing basic legal rights to all people in immigration detention should be an immediate priority for the United States, because this has got to stop.

Mental Health and the Gulf Oil Spill

abby jean — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:28:25 +0000

We are still trying to get our heads around the massive and far-reaching effects of the massive oil spill along the Gulf Coast of the United States. It’s clearly too soon for anyone to even predict what all the effects are going to be, much less estimate the severity or significance of those effects. The spill will affect the environment, the local and national economy, employment, tourism, where people live, even seafood supplies for restaurants. It is also very clear that there will long-term, significant health effects from the spill and the toxic dispersants used by BP to address oil in the ocean.

Putting all of those effects aside, I want to focus on the mental health effects of the spill. Obviously, we are still very close in time to the three month period before July 15, 2010, when an estimated 3 to 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, so quantifying or understanding the mental health effects is difficult. An initial report from Louisiana State University found that nearly 60% of the 925 coastal residents they interviewed “said they were almost constantly worried by the oil spill.” Another recent study done by the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (pdf) gives us some preliminary data on the impact of the spill on the mental health of the coastal population, focusing specifically on the mental health of children. And it is, frankly, not very good news.

The survey was limited to people who live within 10 miles or a 30 minute drive from the coastline in Louisiana and Mississippi. Between 40% and 50% of people had had direct exposure to the oil spill, either by being involved in the cleanup, coming in direct contact with spilled oil or cleanup activities, or who had lost or damaged property as a result of the spill. Excluding children who had emotional or behavioral problems prior to the spill, about 20% of the children in the sample were experiencing mental health problems after the spill. The researches estimate that only about 15-20% of these mental health problems were associated with direct exposure to the spill and cleanup activities, meaning that the remaining 80-85% of mental health problems were among those without direct exposure. Having direct exposure made both adults and kids about twice as likely to report mental health symptoms.

It will be utterly unsurprising to most readers of FWD to learn that mental health problems were related to the race and income of households. Black families were significantly more likely to have mental health problems among both adults and children. Similarly, children in households with incomes less than $25,000 were nearly three times as likely to have mental health problems than children in households with income over $75,000.

The study suggests that these mental health concerns are substantially related to parental concern and uncertainty about remaining in the Gulf Coast area. Households that indicated the family may move away from the area were twice as likely to have a kid with mental health symptoms. As the study says, “the human impact of the oil spill in the Gulf Coast’s “social ecology,” that of its residents, communities, and social networks, may only be accelerated by such uncertainty.”

One woman interviewed by the study told the New York Times how the spill was contributing to mental health problems for her family:

Shannon Drury, a mother of four in Venice, La., said her husband, a commercial fisherman, had been working for BP but was owed six weeks’ pay. For a time after the spill, Ms. Drury was forced to find work as a houseboat cleaner, coming home exhausted at night. Ms. Drury’s 11-year-old daughter has grown more insecure, she said. Another child has developed a mysterious rash that Ms. Drury suspects is infected. Tensions over money, she said, reminded her of the warning from a visiting speaker from Alaska, who said the divorce rate there had skyrocketed after the Exxon Valdez disaster. “I realize what the woman was talking about now, because it puts different strains on your family from what you’ve been used to,” Ms. Drury said.

This kind of mounting pressure is similar to the National Institute of Mental Health’s understanding of how disasters like the oil spill contribute to mental health problems. As NIMH Dr. Farris Tuma explains:

One of the tragedies that we have seen over and over again after large scale disasters, is really a spiraling downward of people who were, maybe, managing to keep their lives together, to keep their emotions and behavioral problems under control. But with some additional stress and some additional disorganization in their community- really became quite disabled by their anxiety, depression, psychosis.

Despite the magnitude of this problem, the current resources available for these families and communities are very limited. One of the women interviewed in the study told the New York Times the only counseling resources to which she had access were a new program started by her church to respond to the spill. All of this suggests that BP should be held responsible for assisting these families with their mental health symptoms resulting from the spill. Unfortunately – and again, unsurprisingly – Kenneth Feinberg, the independent “claims czar” who will decide who gets compensated from BP’s compensation fund, said the fund was not likely to pay damages for mental illness and distress alleged to be caused by the spill.

“If you start compensating purely mental anguish without a physical injury — anxiety, stress — we’ll be getting millions of claims from people watching television,” Feinberg said. “You have to draw the line somewhere. I think it would be highly unlikely that we would compensate mental damage, alleged damage, without a signature physical injury as well.”

Please excuse me while I beat my head against the desk for about an hour or so. The implication that compensating people who have experienced the kind of mental anguish and uncertainty described above would open the door to an endless stream of claims from people who felt mildly upset when viewing television coverage of the spill is so condescending, so insulting, so wildly inappropriate that I’m having trouble responding coherently. This kind of attitude is offensive on a broad level – it minimizes the significant impact of mental health problems by equating them to obviously silly and spurious claims and implies that only physical health problems are “real” problems worth compensating.

But this attitude is even more harmful for Gulf Coast residents. This is compensation that people need in order to seek treatment and assistance with their mental health problems that they are otherwise extremely unlikely to be able to afford or obtain, so denying these claims means they’ll be left to cobble together whatever meager resources they can. As the study discusses, these are not isolated people who live in a vacuum, but will have real and lasting effects on the “social ecology” of the region, affecting entire communities and regions. And the people most likely to be left without any help are those who are already more vulnerable because of their race and their poverty. In short, administering the fund this way and denying these claims will not only perpetuate but actually exacerbate the underlying inequalities in the region, punishing poor children of color for the stigmatizing beliefs held by Mr. Feinberg.

This is especially galling as there have already been suicides linked directly to mental health problems stemming from the oil spill. William Kruse, who had two boats he expected to use for tourism over the summer, was forced to work cleanup for BP and became increasingly depressed and despondent, eventually killing himself in late June. It is almost certain that there have been more suicides that have not received national news coverage. It is unclear whether Mr. Feinberg would consider a gunshot wound to the head a physical injury sufficient to justify compensation of the underlying mental health problem.

Thankfully, the state governments are reaching out to BP for help in this area. Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida have all submitted requests to BP for money to provide mental health services to affected residents. Louisiana has requested $10 million specifically for emergency mental health services to respond to the crisis. (BP has not yet responded to these claims.) We can only hope that these states and the Congressional members who have oversight over the BP compensation fund will continue fighting so that the mental health needs of affected residents can be met.

Thanks to Karen Whyte for the suggestion for this post, as well as for many of the links and materials cited here.

Crude Violations: BP Is Dumping Toxic Waste In Low Income Communities of Colour

s.e. smith — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:29:36 +0000

The Gulf oil spill that has been capturing the news cycle in the United States for the last few months finally appears to be under control, and now we’re faced with a common problem: We have a whole lot of waste from the spill and associated cleanup, and it needs to go somewhere. This includes crude oil, equipment used by cleanup crews, soiled booms, and all kinds of other spill-associated detritus.

According to a story published at Colorlines last week, nine landfills in the Gulf region have been selected as sites for disposing of waste. Waste management authorities claim the material isn’t toxic, which means that regular municipal landfills, rather than landfills specifically designed to handle hazardous waste, are being used. Of the nine landfills chosen, five are located in low income communities of colour.

This is not a coincidence. While it is true that there are a number of primarily nonwhite communities in the Gulf, and that many of these communities are also low income, thus making it statistically more probable that at least some of the waste would end up in such communities, this case is clearly an example of environmental racism. There is a very long history in the United States of pushing unwanted toxic waste into low income communities in general, and communities with large nonwhite populations in particular.

There have been rumblings over the last few months about where BP is putting the oil spill waste, and most of those rumblings have focused on outraged white communities. This distracts neatly from the far more serious issue, the fact that most of this waste would end up in nonwhite communities, and that these communities would experience serious long term consequences. Focusing on white communities also allows the media to completely ignore the overt racism involved in deciding where potentially toxic waste ends up.

From the start, the oil spill has disproportionately impacted people of colour. Many of the cleanup workers were people of colour, and BP also used primarily nonwhite prison labour in oil spill cleanup and tried to hide it. Now, with the spill cleanup winding down, waste from the spill is being dumped on nonwhite communities even as these communities struggle to recover economically from the impacts of the spill. They can look forward to leaching of oil and chemicals from their landfills in the coming decades, and reports on the ground also indicate that the waste is already poorly controlled, with oil slicks and tarballs showing up around communities being used as dumping sites.

Given that this waste is supposedly ‘nontoxic,’ why were cleanup workers wearing protective suits? Given that this waste is supposedly ‘nontoxic,’ why are people who have been exposed to it getting sick? Given that this waste is supposedly ‘nontoxic,’ why is care being taken to ensure it doesn’t end up in privileged communities?

Crude oil can contain things like benzene, chromium, mercury, sulfur, toluene, and xylene. These substances are known to have deleterious effects on human health; at the very least, skin irritation and difficulty breathing. The oil spill waste also contains traces of dispersants, known to be toxic. And the government wants to stand by the claim that the waste isn’t toxic? Dumping these waste in facilities poorly equipped to handle it will result in long term environmental repercussions, in addition to human health problems.

I’ve written here before about how hazardous waste disposal methods tend to disproportionately impact communities of colour, and how they are most definitely a disability rights issue. Environmental pollution is a disability rights issue, and it’s a social justice issue. Toxic waste makes people sick. Making people sick is not ok, especially when familiar patterns of oppression can be seen in who is exposed to the greatest risks. If this waste is nontoxic, surely it can go in any landfill, and it would make sense to use landfills as close to the coast as possible, right? So the waste travels the shortest distance? What exactly was the selection process behind the nine landfills identified as sites for Gulf spill waste?

BP, like other major oil companies, has a long history of engaging in environmental pollution, including unauthorized dumping of materials known to be toxic. The vast majority of this pollution occurs in communities least equipped to fight it, and when oil companies are caught doing it, often the biggest punishment is a relatively small fine. In this case, BP isn’t being clandestine: the company is being openly invited to dump waste. The claim is that it’s ‘nonhazardous,’ but is it? Even if it’s not toxic, is it really the kind of thing we want leaching out of landfills and into waterways and farmlands?

These communities will be dealing with the repercussions of BP’s dumping well into the future, just like communities all over the world where people are sickening and dying because of toxic materials present in the environment. Just like communities where rates of chromosomal anomalies are skyrocketing as a result of exposure to toxic substances. Communities with limited support systems to help sick and disabled community members are the ones disproportionately facing an increase in chronic conditions and disabilities. A long term policy of dumping toxic pollutants on low income nonwhite communities and refusing to provide support for the consequences sends a pretty clear message to members of those communities, as well as to the rest of society.

We need to be talking about the connection between environmental pollution and racism and we need to be combating plans to dump hazardous waste on low income communities of colour, from protesting clearly racist environmental policy to working in solidarity with communities who are actively fighting toxic waste disposal in their landfills and on their sacred lands.