Why do people with invisible, not physically manifested, disabilities have to 'pass' or 'fake it until they make it' with soft skill self-help plugged on social media and email lists from sources like govexec.com and theladders.com
and others,
among other 'free advice' ('that's worth the price') 'pop/positive psychology' or 'professional/personal development journalism' sources? People with physically manifested, visible or 'intense needs' disabilities retain access to IL (independent living) services paid for in part by someone else. The oppression olympics/severity contest/respectability politics games started, as cost-shifting backlash to disability civil rights law ADA and 2008 ADAA, in part, with Walter Olson's 1997 book.
The book "The Excuse Factory" by Walter Olson distorted individual circumstances where civil rights law was applied into allegations of manipulating law to excuse incompetence that developed into stigma and stereotypes of people with disabilities attempting to obtain reasonable accommodation to perform essential job functions in their workplaces. Anyone who supervised anyone else in their workplace became unnecessarily wary. People with disabilities started learning how to pass as not disabled to avoid the stigma and stereotypes out of fear that attempting to 'come out' or 'disclose their disabilities' would cost them their jobs or job opportunities.
Chapter 7 "Accommodating Demons" was particularly problematic in this regard. The first page of the printed chapter is inserted above.
Walter Olson returned to dividing people with disabilities by severity to shift costs of inclusion from the corporate class that did harm to the (oppressed) class with disabilities, in 2010, 20 years after the ADA was signed.
The division was echoed in 2015 by Senator Rand Paul R-KY to push Republicans farther right and Democratic legislators farther right in 'centrist bipartisan consensus' that is a revision of the social contract after gas lighting a similar policy argument tactic to black knighting . A third 'label' for the same problem in public discourse is
centrist-extremist politics described in a 1998 political research associates paper.
People drop out of civic involvement or 'politics,' because it's "gloomy" as Tyler Cowen describes it in "Create Your Own Economy/Age of the Infovore," and Cowen credits autistics for understanding politics as "gloomy," for their focus only on helping themselves and others they self-select as equal members of an 'identity politics' or 'autistic community' to solve individual problems without the use of publicly-funded resources.
The alternative, viewing many similar individual problems as a sign of a systemic problem, is not a focus of 'identity politics" activism unless it involves immediate threats to the life or freedom of movement of a person in the 'identity politics' community. Solving individual problems without systemic solutions allows cost-shifting that enables the income and wealth inequality that's a hallmark of neoliberalism/neoconservatism/market anarchism/pre-Keynes Austrian school economics of Friedrich Hayek. Hayek's neurology and psychology writings are also cited by Tyler Cowen perhaps as a basis for experimental or behavioral economics two more new names for the same old neoliberalism/neoconservatism/market anarchism/pre-Keynes neoclassical economics. By failing to blame Republicans for making 'politics' "gloomy" in the first place Tyler Cowen shows the Republican/corporatist/libertarian/pre-Keynes Austrian school economic biases of the donors to George Mason University and its Mercatus Center (Charles and David Koch and their fellow donors organized through Freedom Partners) who might pay part of Cowen's salary and support his "marginal revolution" blog marketed with the slogan 'world's most popular economist.' George Mason University had a 2002 Nobel Prize winning (economics same field as Cowen) faculty member named Vernon L. Smith who disclosed his disability/'came out autistic.'
The advantages of 'mild autism' may likely include ability to shift public costs to individual costs in money, or time, to restrain the growth of federal spending to allow balanced budgets at the federal level overturning the Keynesian concept that deficit spending can overturn bad business cycles by keeping demand drops from worsening bad business cycles.
Vernon L. Smith actually disclosed his disability/'came out' as living with Asperger's Syndrome before erasure of the diagnosis and Hans Asperger was 'exposed' as a nazi sympathizer personally, as well as erasing his contribution to spreading knowledge of the diversity of independent living skills, in people on the later-recognized autism spectrum. Smith was allowed to leave for a job at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Maybe Vernon Smith's scholarship didn't legitimize neoliberals (where neoclassical, neoconservative, market anarchist, Austrian school economics are new names for the same political/economic view) as much as Tyler Cowen's publication record has, at a lower pay level that George Mason University's state-funded budget could 'afford,' since a 2000 paper.
More people could be helped more quickly if the many selves in self advocacy communities would change and repair the existing systems. The struggle for Medicaid as is, rather than expanding it as well as ending its 'institutional bias' toward paying for nursing homes not HCBS providing LTSS delivered in communities chosen by the beneficiary with a disability in compliance with Olmstead vs. LC and EW, and the broader struggle to save the ACA in 2017 is an example.
I rustedaspie (humble author of this post), and about 3 other people I was hired with, lost Medicaid benefits in 2003 for supported employment services that helped us find jobs
The Md. Medicaid cut in 2003, and 2009 demands to restore the cut, (2 images below) that restricted eligibility criteria to incomes above 116% of poverty after it had been at 300% of poverty, proposed by then-Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich devastated, to the point of closure and leaving people with disabilities unserved including the author of this blog post, by 2017 is shown in the images below.
for the same employer in 2000. Fewer people organized or fought, to a comparable extent, because the independent living issues lost a severity contest/oppression olympics/we weren't 'graded' as suffering from intense 'enough' needs. The only direct risk was unemployment not being forced to live in a nursing home
Around that time, disability justice activists, including Carl Peterson of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), had what Peterson describes as a "really, really disconcerting call" with Gregoire's people. "They basically said, 'This is her budget, she's not going to make any changes to it.' It was horrible," he remembers. "It was her budget, and she felt very entitled that she had that power." The district attorney's office made the situation worse, according to Ganapathiraju, by trying "to convince the governor that if you back down on this issue, you'll never be able to make any cuts on any of your programs ever again. Which is not true, but that's the kind of message the governor was getting," he says.
On paper, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provides that disabled people are entitled to the "most integrated" setting and the Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. (known in disabled activist circles as disability's Brown v. Board of Education) found that people with mental disabilities should be allowed to live in the community, not institutions, on the condition that states have the resources to provide community care. In 2011, Governor Gregoire's cuts led to another case that was based around Olmstead, a case called M.R. v. Dreyfus. In Dreyfus, 12 disabled plaintiffs successfully argued that Washington's budget cuts would mean they wouldn't be able to get the hours with a care assistant they needed for basics like bathing, eating and going to the doctor. Their health would deteriorate, and they'd inevitably be sent to nursing homes. The plaintiffs won, but the fight wasn't over. Gregoire filed to extend the deadline for appealing the decision. Disability justice activists went into overdrive, calling in organizers from as far away as DC, New York and Texas.
In the case of Washington State, the pushback worked. After several protests, press conferences and petitions, Gregoire re-checked her pocketbook. In October 2012, Gregoire released an official statement: she would not challenge M.R. v. Dreyfus. It was a big win for disability rights advocates. ASAN's Peterson believes the national organizing made a "huge" difference. Without it, "honestly, we wouldn't have been able to pull this off," he says. "If we didn't organize, if that protest didn't happen" at the state capitol, "if those op-eds didn't get written, and what have you, I think she probably would have sent [the original budget] out."
….
Petty, whose business caters mostly to seniors, believes the socialization offered by his "continuing care retirement communities" (CCRCs) helps combat depression. And even Ganapathiraju, who now sits on the Governor's Committee on Disability Issues and Employment, admits that often nursing homes are "Sometimes the only option, or the best option, especially for folks, say, with special needs, that need an extra kind of guide throughout the day." Still, the majority of disabled people (and seniors) would rather live outside of such facilities - even a place like Wesley, with its game rooms outfitted with Nintendo Wii systems, shuttles to the mall and concierge services. In fact, when asked whether or not he sees himself ever living in a CCRC, Petty laughs: "That's a great question. Everybody in the field, when they're my age, go, 'No.' As does everybody else. I have no idea, to be honest with you." So it shouldn't come as a surprise that in 2011, there were 511,000 people in the United States on waiting lists for waivers for home care services. Likewise, an AARP study from 2012 found that 64 percent of Medicaid long-term service dollars for older people and adults with physical disabilities went to nursing facilities, the study's authors noted, "even though most people prefer to live at home." (Meanwhile, the most recent Congressional report on the subject found that 9 out of 10 nursing homes were understaffed over a two-year period from 1999-2001.)
or having our communication needs misunderstood and criminalized (Zakh Price and Kayleb Moon-Robinson).
Passing, by consciously changing how one presents oneself to the world, to be accepted as a 'member' of a privileged (or socially and economically dominant) class has been written about mostly in a context of racial discrimination.
Call number for the book below, with a summary and a review, (Dewey Decimal System) is 305.8 HOB.
Title:
A chosen exile : a history of racial passing in American life / Allyson Hobbs.
Author:
Hobbs, Allyson Vanessa.
ISBN:
9780674368101
Personal Author:
Hobbs, Allyson Vanessa.
Publication Information:
Harvard Univ Pr 2014
Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.
As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one's birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one's own.
Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied-and often outweighed-these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to "pass out" and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.
Choice Review
In contrast to most scholarship on racial passing, Hobbs (Stanford) focuses on the losses rather than the rewards that racially ambiguous individuals experienced as a result of their decision to assume a white identity. In addition to literary texts, Hobbs draws on a wide range of historical sources, including runaway slave advertisements, censuses, diaries, letters, and newspapers to demonstrate that from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries, racial passing was neither a hidden enterprise nor an individualistic endeavor. The decision of racially indeterminate men and women to reject their black racial identity deeply affected the larger communities they left behind. Hobbs, whose own family history is marked by the phenomenon of passing, contends that the losses-personal, familial, and psychological-outweighed the advantages that racially ambiguous persons accrued from passing, encouraging many of these individuals to "come home," as she calls it, by the 1940s and 1950s. Hobbs's cultural history of passing provides greater insight into the simultaneous malleability and salience of race in US life, and helps readers understand the continued tensions surrounding racial hybridity in the 21st century. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Meredith L. Roman, SUNY Brockport
This older book, with a Dewey Decimal call number of 302.1 KRO,
Title:
Passing : when people can't be who they are / Brooke Kroeger.
Author:
Kroeger, Brooke, 1949-
ISBN:
9781891620997
Personal Author:
Kroeger, Brooke, 1949-
Edition:
1st ed.
Publication Information:
New York : Public Affairs, c2003.
broadens the concept of passing from avoiding racial discrimination to avoiding any form of discrimination that civil rights law 'protected class' framework, enforced by 'test case' litigation one person at a time, attempts to remedy. The costs of 'following the law' by the dominant sociopolitical class are shifted to the dominated sociopolitical class instead of being borne by the dominant class that originally caused the social and economic individual and class harm. The dominated sociopolitical class has less ability to pay those costs in money and in time, to learn skills to 'save money' by making whatever could not be purchased at an individual, and collective, level. Inequalities in paying the shifted costs lead to arguments within the dominated class that slow class-wide progress by keeping the dominated class divided against itself 'looking down the privilege class ladder' instead of unified to 'look up' the 'privilege class ladder.'
The Booklist review nails the economic intersectionality of why people try to 'pass' or 'fake it until they make it' with help of other selves (people) in self-advocacy/identity politics communities. "Politics' is too "gloomy," as Tyler Cowen wrote in Create Your Own Economy/Age of the Infovore," to wait for progress to 'trickle down' to all individuals.
Booklist Review
The term passing is most often thought of as racial minorities passing for white to receive the privileges denied them due to race. But [K]roeger plumbs the varieties and complexities of passing across racial, sexual, and economic lines. She offers profiles of a black man who passed for a white [J]ew; a working-class Puerto Rican woman who became an Orthodox [J]ew and passed for privileged; a gay man at a conservative [J]ewish seminary passing for straight; a lesbian naval officer who passed for straight; and a respected poet who, on a lark, adopts a difference persona and ends up writing pseudonymously about the rock-and-roll music scene. [K]roeger intersperses these profiles with references in history, literature, psychology, and contemporary culture that explore the dynamics of passing--the lies and deception involved as well as the separation from community and family. She also explores the parallels between civil disobedience and passing, which, although it is a self-centered act, allows the passer to secure opportunities in the present rather than waiting for social change. An engaging look at how certain people choose to deal with social inequities. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2003 Booklist
