My sister can't read.

Her disability usually isn't obvious when you meet her. And when she's home visiting my parents, she spends a fair amount of time out in the city on her own. She takes the bus, she shops, she goes to restaurants. She gets her nails done.

My dad gives her her walking-around money as five-dollar bills to limit how much she can lose if someone decides to cheat her when giving change.

But like I say, mostly her disability is invisible. And when folks do notice, they're usually cool about it.

(I remember once, years ago, I was out with L and we got into some sort of awkward situation. I wanted to explain to the woman we were inconveniencing, and so I said "she's..." And then I wasn't sure how to finish the sentence. The woman said "a little slow." It wasn't a phrase I'd ever use myself, and I cringe a little typing it, but she said it with love, and when she said it I felt myself unclench. We were among friends.)

But here's something I wish I could tell everyone in the city: Not everyone can read.

I see it at least once a month, when I'm out and around. Someone on the subway or the street or in a shop will ask a question. "Is this the 14th Street stop?" "How much is a Big Mac?" "What kind of iced tea do you have?" Usually, whoever's asked will answer appropriately, but too often they'll glance up and say "read the sign."


My sister will take a menu when she's offered it. But she can't read.

She'll flip through a magazine when she's bored. But she can't read.

She has a library card. But she can't read.

She's 32 years old, and she looks like any other 32-year-old on the subway. But she can't read.


My sister is good at keeping her disability to herself. She likes keeping her disability to herself. When she's out on the street, away from all of us who know and love and worry about her, she's just another New Yorker. But every once in a while, she could use a little help maintaining her public face.

As we all could.

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day, and you can read. Go read.


(I wrote this post for the first Blogging Against Disablism Day in 2006. Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day 2008. I've updated the URL, but otherwise left the post unchanged.)

Tags: disability, essays, family

Earlier this evening, pnkrokhockeymom put up this post on her attempts to grapple with privilege. It's got a terrific Patricia Williams quote in it, and it does a great job interrogating the concept of "normal." It's a lovely post.

A few minutes ago, I had sufficient wine in me to write and post the following comment. Right now I'm still tipsy enough to press "Post" again. You should probably read it quick, though --- I may sober up soon.

( Jump! )

Tags: essays, history, race

One of the brushfires in the maelstrom currently roiling the feminist blogosphere regards a comment a woman of color made in a comments thread over at Feministe a few days ago.

"When it comes down to it," she said, "you white chicks, ya’ll really aren’t to be trusted."

Several people immediately echoed that comment when it was made, and several others objected to it in strong terms. Commenter Sailorman was one of the latter. Objecting generally to claims that "white people can't be trusted," he said this:

Jeez, it’s not so freakin' hard to insert the word "some" or "most" or "many" or "often" or whatever the hell you want into these sentences. It’s ONE WORD. Or two, if you want to say "almost all." Perhaps if people would take the time to add those few letters we’d not continually have the “it’s not about you” argument in the first place.

I mean, really. I don’t understand why people use general language and then get pissy when someone else reads it literally ESPECIALLY if it takes no more than two words to actually say the correct thing.

I see where Sailorman (and the folks who had similar responses) are coming from. Here's the thing, though.

"White people can’t be trusted" can be read in one of two ways --- as a blanket statement about white people, or as a statement about how people of color should approach them. And given the context in which statements like that were made on that thread, I think the second reading isn’t only more generous, it’s also more reasonable as a literal interpretation of what was meant.

Let's say I’m on the subway, and I leave my messenger bag on the seat when I get up to check the map. When I get back, the woman sitting next to me says "you should take your bag with you --- you can’t trust people on the subway."

Is she saying that nobody on the subway is worthy of trust? Is she saying that everyone on the subway is a thief? No. She’s saying, rightly, that you make a mistake if you put your trust in the community of subway riders not to steal your bag, because in the long run enough of them will betray your trust to make the extension of that trust a losing proposition.

That's what I hear when I hear "white people can’t be trusted." I hear a claim that the cost of trusting white people, the cost of expending energy on multiracial political action, outweighs the benefits. That there are enough white people who will betray your trust to make multiracial organizing a bad idea.

Is it true? Sometimes, definitely. Anyone who's ever done serious multiracial organizing can tell you horror stories. I don’t believe it’s always true, but it’s true far more than I’d like.

And here's one other thing, going back to the subway analogy. What makes it true that you can't trust folks on the subway with your bag isn’t just that there are a few thieves on the subway. It's also that there are so few people who will stand up to a thief. If there are two potential thieves in the car, but a dozen people who will confront that thief, your bag is a lot safer than if there were just one thief who could be sure that everyone else would look the other way.

So if you don't like it when folks call your community untrustworthy, do your bit. Demonstrate that you're worthy of trust. Do your part to shift the cost-benefit analysis in the right direction.

One last thought, courtesy of commenter Kristen in the same thread. Yesterday she got groped on the Metro, and she told her husband that she was "sick and fucking tired of men." He said "Well, that’s not all men. You can't be tired of all men. I'm a man." Her response? "Murderous rage." Here's how she sums up:

See? I know "men" was an over-generalization. I know it was sloppy thinking. But sometimes when you're pissed you aren't being perfectly clear. And when the listener gets derailed by the details and doesn’t listen to the actual complaint…then it can be damn irritating.

What she said.

Tags: essays, gender, race

So about a month back I was tagged with this. The idea, as lauredhel summarized it, is "to list three things the taggee believes are necessary for good, powerful writing."

Seeing as how I've just finished a major editing project, and am neck-deep in the middle of an even bigger one, and seeing as how my other other huge project is currently in a research phase, I'm going to write about editing.

1. Get out your pen.

I know some folks only ever edit on-screen, and if that works for you, great. But if you haven't tried pen-and-paper editing, give it a whirl. I find it makes structural revision a lot easier, for starters --- I'm a lot less daunted by the prospect of moving big hunks of text around when I can see the before and the after in front of me at the same time.

It's also my experience that writing by hand produces a different tone than typing. In academic writing particularly, a passage that I sketch out in pen or pencil will tend to be less clenched than one composed at the keyboard, and I have a sense that there's a similar effect at work in the editing stage.

2. Cut. Cut some more.

When you've got the piece in decent shape --- it's structurally sound, it says pretty much what you want it to say, it maybe sings a little --- it's time to start cutting. Do a word count, then take an axe to the thing. If you're anything like me, you're going to need to do this a bunch of times. Word count, read-through. Count again, cut again. Look for vestigial paragraphs, meandering sentences, even unnecessarily long words. Cut the piece to the bone, get it to the point where it's as short as it can reasonably be, and then scrape away another ten percent.

A corollary to this is that if you're writing to meet a word count, your first draft should be long. Seriously long. If you're looking to submit a 700-word essay or a 10-minute conference presentation, and your first draft is 764 words or 11 minutes and 13 seconds, you're not going to be able to bring yourself to make the cuts you need. You'll convince yourself that slack passages are tight, because you'll be stressing at the prospect of ending up with a final draft that's half as long as it should be. Write a big, ambitious piece, and stress about which of your gems to leave out. It's a much more fun way to stress.

3. Read it aloud.

Really good writing reads well when it's spoken, even if it wasn't written to be read aloud. If something flows when you speak it, it'll flow in your reader's head. So when you've got your piece close, when you've done all the structural stuff and most of the cutting, print it out and read it, with a pen or pencil in your hand. When you stumble over a word, mark the word. Keep reading, marking as you go. When you're all the way through, or when you get to a passage that completely bogs you down, go back and look at the marks. See if you can figure out what tripped you up --- two consonants banging up against each other, a rhyme you didn't intend, a sentence that takes an unexpected turn in the middle --- and fix it. If you can't figure out why you stumbled, consider changing it anyway. Repeat the process until you can read it through without a hitch, or until you run out of time or interest.

Tags: essays, work

Over at Pandagon, a commenter named six-oh-seven-nine suggested that feminism needs to craft a positive conception of the masculine, a sense of how men who are supportive of feminism should construct their own masculinity. I wrote back that any “positive” definition of masculinity pretty much has to define itself in opposition to, or at least in contrast to, some definition of femininity, and said a little bit about why that idea strikes me as a non-starter. I said that I don't think you need a “culture-wide concept” of masculinity to talk in general terms about what men should be and do as non-sexist people in a sexist world.

Six-oh-seven-nine wrote back, in part, that "we live in a confusing culture and many boys and many men are struggling to come to grips with how to be a man and how a man acts. For many of those people shrugging them off and saying 'well, be a good, egalitarian person' just won’t cut it."

I definitely get that. But I still think there’s another option.

My message to my daughter about who I want her to become isn’t just “be a good, egalitarian person.” I want her to be strong, and brave, and fierce. I want her to be thoughtful, and kind, and careful. I want her to leap to the aid of those who need her help, and to think hard about what help they really need before leaping. I want her to be righteous without being self-righteous, and gentle without being fragile. I want her to be able to yell and cry and scream when it’s called for, and to be able to be silent and still when that’s what’s needed. I want her to be powerful, and I want her to know it’s okay to be weak sometimes too.

If I had a son, I’d want all of that for him. If I were mentoring someone who was struggling with how to be a man, I’d advise him along those lines, and try to model that behavior. But I’m not comfortable with saying that that’s what masculinity means to me, or that that’s how I believe a man should act, because for me none of it is gendered behavior.

Feminists have an easier time talking to — and about — girls than boys, it seems to me, because there are models within feminism through which we can exalt both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine virtues in girls and women. We all understand that it’s good for girls to be strong, and that there’s no conflict in principle between a girl being strong and a girl being kind.

With boys and men its harder, no question. But I don’t believe the answer is to be found in a feminist reclamation of masculinity. Menschlekeit, maybe, but not masculinity.

Tags: essays, gender, parenting

Kind of a weak article in the Times this morning on a fascinating topic --- voting rights for people with severe cognitive disabilities.

The article opens by describing a current dispute in Rhode Island that demonstrates the potential popular appeal of measures to deny the vote to people with certain cognitive impairments. It involves two murderers, each of whom received a "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict at trial, and each of whom is currently institutionalized. Both would be barred from voting under Rhode Island law if they had been convicted of the murders they committed, and I'll concede that it does seem a little counterintuitive that the fact of their mental illness should be the circumstance that protects their vote. (The voting rights of felons themselves is a topic for another post.)

But advocates for the men make a compelling case that the act of voting is a valuable part of their treatment and a step in the process of reintegrating them into the world. And a local election official's take on the case shows how broadly an adverse precedent could be applied, saying that "if you are declared insane you should not be allowed to vote, period." He continues, "Is insanity a disability? I have an answer to that: no. You’re insane; you’re nuts."

The Times article makes prominent reference to the "risks" of voting by people with cognitive disabilities, but the only examples of such risks it offers are cases in which it was charged that absentee ballots were filed fraudulently on behalf of nursing home residents. And such abuse does not require an "incompetent" voter, as the article contends --- just a nursing home staffer willing to defraud the elderly by submitting illegitimate absentee ballots in their names.

Near the end of the piece, a Columbia psychiatry professor named Paul Appelbaum is quoted saying that "to fail to have any standard that requires a person to have a grasp of what the process is all about would degrade the voting process." This makes me bridle for three reasons.

First, his use of the conditional mood ("would degrade") suggests that we currently do have such a standard, and that there's a danger in eliminating it. Given that Appelbaum is an advocate of subjecting Alzheimer's patients who wish to continue voting to testing not currently mandated by law, this is a tendentious misrepresentation of the current state of voting rights.

Second, the idea of a "standard that requires a person to have a grasp of what the process is all about" brings to my mind the infamous voter literacy tests of the Jim Crow era. Such tests were never applied uniformly or fairly, and their very existence was --- like the tests that Appelbaum wishes to impose on Alzheimer's patients --- a violation of the principle that all citizens are presumptively entitled to vote.

Finally, Appelbaum's role in this process itself concerns me. Health care professionals should not be forced to serve as gatekeepers for the franchise, and Appelbaum's eagerness to perform that function does not mitigate the impropriety of imposing it on other doctors.

New Jersey's state constitution presently includes a 1789 clause declaring that "No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage." A proposal before the state legislature would bring the wording of the constitution into accordance with state case law by replacing the phrase "idiot or insane person" with "person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting."

This approach is, it seems to me, the right one. It is narrowly tailored to the specific competency requirements involved in the exercise of the franchise, it considers the question of voter competency on a case-by-case basis, and it places the question of eligibility in the hands of the courts, rather than those of doctors or local election officials.

Tags: aging, disability, essays, history, politics

In a post on the Alicia Colon op-ed I mentioned yesterday, Andrew Sullivan wonders what caused all the peacetime deaths Colon is talking about. It's a question I've seen asked elsewhere, and one that's relevant to the ways the Colon piece is being spun.

The short answer is that most of them were accidents, and that most of the rest were due to illness or suicide. Between 1980 and 2005, 55% of American military deaths were accidental, 18% were related to illness, and 14% were self-inflicted. Only 6% were due to hostile action or terrorist attack.

The military has long been a dangerous occupation, even in peacetime. More than ten thousand American servicepeople died in accidents during the Reagan administration.

As I said yesterday, though, the military made great strides in the 1980s and 1990s in reducing these risks. They were particularly successful in lowering the accident rate --- there were 1,524 deaths due to accident in the American military in 1981, and just 398 in 2000.

A lot of conservatives are adopting the line that the deaths from the Iraq War are comparable to what we'd see in peacetime, and in one sense they're correct --- a generation ago, we did see these kind of mortality figures in the peacetime armed forces. But those mortality rates weren't acceptable then, and the military worked hard to bring them down.

The military is still a dangerous occupation, even in peacetime. But --- and I can hardly believe I have to say this --- war is more dangerous than peace. In 2000, 758 American servicemembers died. In 2005, 1,951 American servicemembers died. Those aren't comparable figures. They represent twelve hundred young Americans whose families are grieving them today. (And the statistics don't speak to those who were grievously injured that year, or to the local dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Do those twelve hundred dead, or the twelve hundred before them, or the twelve hundred after, mean that this war is not worth fighting? No. Some wars are worth fighting at high human cost, and others are not even if the cost is low. But these lives are lives lost because of this war, and that loss should not be obfuscated or ignored, least of all by those who demanded the war and those who demand that it continue.

Tags: essays, the war

(Wednesday update: I've written a follow-up to this post, examining the question of peacetime military fatalities in more detail, and addressing some of the uses to which the Colon piece has been put.)

Over at The Corner this morning, Jonah Goldberg linked to a New York Sun op-ed by Alicia Colon that sought to put American Iraq War combat deaths in "proper perspective." The "total military dead in the Iraq war between 2003 and this month stands at about 3,133," she wrote, compared with "4,417 [military] deaths in peacetime" in Clinton's first term.

These are startling figures, about which Goldberg said he'd "like to know more." So here you go, Jonah:

The first thing worth knowing about the numbers is that they compare total military deaths in Clinton's first term with Iraq War deaths under George W. Bush. All told, there were 5,076 US military fatalities between 2003 and 2005, not 3,133 between 2003 and early 2007.

The second thing worth knowing is that deaths of US military personnel dropped steadily over the course of the Clinton administration, as they had under Reagan and George HW Bush. In 1981, Reagan's first year in office, there were 2,380 US military deaths. In 2000, Clinton's last year, there were 758. The military got steadily better at protecting the lives of its servicemembers during Clinton's two terms in office, in other words, and Colon's use of his first-term numbers as a point of reference deliberately obscures that fact.

The third thing worth knowing is that it's not just combat deaths that rise in time of war. Military deaths by accident and illness doubled between 2000 and 2005, and homicides rose by a third. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed stresses on the military that don't appear in combat fatality figures.

And just now a commenter at The Corner, responding to Goldberg's request for data, said that "we're fighting this war with lower casualties than that expected from normal training accidents in a peacetime army." Setting aside the fact that the category of "casualties" includes injuries, of which our current wars have produced far more than the military would see in peacetime, that claim asks us to ignore the advances that our military has made in the last quarter-century in safeguarding the lives of its members.

The graphic at right shows the number of US military deaths per 100,000 personnel from 1981 to 2005. In it, we see that the death rate of American troops dropped steadily during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, and that by 2000 it had fallen to less than half of what it had been in 1981. That's a tremendous achievement, and a credit to the military.

But it's an achievement that's been undone by four years of war --- and it's an achievement that some are apparently willing to erase from memory in the cause of propaganda.

Update: Here's a single stat that sums up the above argument. In the final three calendar years of Clinton's administration, there were 2,381 US military fatalities. In the first three calendar years of the Iraq War there were 5,076.

That bears repeating, I think:

US military fatalities, 1998-2000: 2,381.
US military fatalities, 2003-2005: 5,076.

(The statistics I cite in this post can be found here, in the Excel spreadsheet entitled "U.S. Active Duty Military Deaths by Manner of Death: 1980 to 2005.")

Tags: essays, politics, the war

When we were in New Orleans in October, our local friends offered to drive us around town so we could see for ourselves how things were going, one year on. They live in the Garden District, on high ground --- their house didn't flood at all --- so when we set off from their driveway, the story unfolded gradually.

The first unusual thing you notice, as you enter a moderately-hit neighborhood, is the water line. Its height varies block by block, with the elevation of the local terrain. It comes and goes, too, with the degree of recovery --- almost all the vacant houses have water lines on them, and occupied homes are less likely to. When you see a lived-in home with a water line on it you note that the line is still there, and you wonder what it's like to walk past it each day.

The spray-painted glyphs --- the huge inscribed X shapes that indicated when a house was searched, and by whom, and whether any bodies were found inside --- are still ubiquitous. Many homeowners have painted over them, but many more have not. Some of the glyphs were sprayed onto brick, or bare wood, and those look like they'd be real trouble to remove.

Most of the neighborhoods where the water didn't rise above about chest height seem to be rebounding. Obviously abandoned homes are few, and each block looks pretty much like another. There plenty of FEMA trailers in those communities, though, and a surprising number of "RE-OPENING SOON" banners on businesses. Things haven't stabilized yet. The work isn't done.

In the lower-lying neighborhoods the returnees are less frequent and the block-by-block variation is more pronounced. Folks are clustering, it seems --- if your neighbor has come back, you're more likely to come back. Some streets are mostly occupied, others mostly dark. There are more FEMA trailers in these neighborhoods, more people living in tin cans in front of their homes.

In the hardest-hit neighborhoods, where the floodwaters surged in, there aren't many trailers and there aren't many lights. In large swaths of the Lower Ninth Ward, there aren't many houses. The buildings were crushed into rubble by the storm, and the rubble has mostly been carted away. Whole city blocks are just rectangles of grassland now. Driving through in the dusk, the occasional glowing house has the look of a frontier homestead.

One more note on those spray-painted glyphs. Most of the ones I've seen pictures of on television and in magazines have had a non-zero number in the bottom quadrant, indicating that one or more bodies were found in that house. The marks have become a symbol of the storm's human toll.

But I saw several hundred of those glyphs on my trip, and my eyes were drawn to the bottom quadrant each time, and each time the number there was zero.

It's been estimated that 125,000 New Orleans homes were flooded by Katrina. For every home that a body was pulled out of, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, that filled with water and sewage, and were searched, and were found to be uninhabited. And a year later, tens of thousands of those homes are still empty, still uninhabited, still marked with a spray-painted X.

Tags: essays, new orleans

Okay, here's the thing. Here's the thing that those of us who are no longer kids, not yet old, and not presently dealing with disabilities need to understand:

Public space is not our space. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities don't use parks, restaurants, stores, museums, and theaters at our indulgence, because it's not our space. It's everyone's space, and everyone has an equal claim on it.

Parents who take their kids to adult-oriented places --- myself very much included --- tend to overstate the case for our children. "My kid would never scream in a museum or throw food in a restaurant," we say. " My kid would never impose on other people, and if she did, I'd deal with it. When you're complaining about kids, you're complaining about other people's kids. Don't lump my kid in with them."

But here's my secret: My kid doesn't actually behave as well as I do in museums. Sometimes she whines. Sometimes she has to be reminded to to keep her voice down, or not to run. So yeah, when I take her to the Museum of Modern Art, we do impose on other patrons, at least a little.

And you know what? A little imposition on other patrons is okay. I'll apologize sincerely to anyone she disturbs, but I'm not going to apologize for her presence. Because MoMA is C2's space as much as it is mine.

My sister whines in public sometimes, too. Sometimes she gets overwhelmed and cries. Sometimes she raises her voice. (Running in museums is not an issue with her, I'm happy to say.) If we say that C2 shouldn't go to museums because she might whine or cry or raise her voice, then we have to say that my sister can't go either --- and one of the best days I ever spent with my sister was the day that we visited a MoMA exhibit of design for people with disabilities. MoMA is my sister's space as much as it is mine.

And if we say that people who might whine or cry or raise their voices shouldn't go to museums, then we're going to have to bar my grandmother, too --- if not now then very soon. My grandmother the artist. My grandmother who, when she was in college in Idaho six decades ago, read Dorothy Parker and hung a print of the Rouen cathedral on her wall. My grandmother, whose copies of the catalogues of the MoMA "High and Low" exhibit and the Peggy Guggenheim collection sit on my bookshelf.

MoMA is my grandmother's space far more than it is mine. She almost certainly will never again see the inside of it, but if she does, the rest of the people there will just have to suck it up. She's old, and being old isn't always pretty.

I was talking about all this on the phone with C1 a little while ago, talking about the fact that this way of looking at things is a lot less clean, a lot less comfortable than the "you're complaining about other people's kids, not mine" way. Talking about the question of disruptiveness, and how much is too much. And she reminded me what she tells C2 about riding her Big Wheel on the sidewalk --- that it's not enough to not bump into people, that you have to respect them. You can't ride so fast or so close that you scare them, or make them step out of your way. If you see that they're nervous, you have to slow down even more, and give them even more room. You have to minimize the disruption as much as you can.

Because C2 isn't a lone child zooming through a world of uniformly robust adults. When she's out on the street, she's riding next to other kids who might not be paying attention, and next to old people who might be really worried about falling and shattering a hip, and next to folks carrying heavy and fragile packages, and so on and on. The duty to minimize disruption isn't a duty that the young and the old and those with disabilities have to the robust adults among us, it's a reciprocal duty that each of us, whatever our condition, has to each of our neighbors, whatever their condition.

Each of us has an obligation to refrain from whining too long or too loudly in museums. But each of us also has an obligation to accept the company of others good-naturedly, and to respond with grace when disruptions inevitably occur.


Update: Oh, and one other thing. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities aren't the only people who occasionally cause disruption in public spaces through no fault of their own. Anyone can be seized by a coughing fit at the ballet.

Tags: aging, disability, essays, parenting, politics