Global Crisis

This story was just brought to my attention in the comment from "Mel" in my previous post.

In 2010, John T. Williams, a Native Alaskan woodcarver, was walking down the street holding a 3-inch folding knife and a piece of wood.

Officer Ian Birk approached him from behind, firearm drawn, and ordered Williams to drop the knife.  Williams kept walking, so Birk shot him in the back four times. Backup arrived, and then they approached the body and cuffed him. As near as I can tell, no first aid was applied. Video is below.

Birk was not charged.

After an inquest into the Seattle police shooting last month, four of eight jurors said they believed Officer Ian Birk thought Williams posed a threat during the Aug. 30 incident. Three couldn't determine whether he did. Only one juror believed Williams actually posed a threat.

Witnesses to the shooting testified that Williams -- a heavy drinker who had mental health problems, according to family members -- wasn't threatening the officer and that Birk may have fired in haste. Birk, however, maintained that he feared for his life and had to shoot Williams. 

When you watch the video, it will be hard for me to understand how an armed officer approaching a slowly walking man in his 50s from behind could justify being afraid. But this is the pattern. No one can prove whether or not the man was afraid (although "reasonably" afraid is, as I understand it, the legal standard).

Here's why this case matters especially to me. Williams was deaf in one ear. He was, according to a family member, wearing earbuds at the time as well. He couldn't hear Birk. And because he couldn't hear, he was killed, and the killer escaped without criminal charge.

The police review board did find the killing unjustified, Birk resigned, and the city settled a lawsuit for 1.5 million dollars.

This is the cult of compliance. This is the "be normal" or die mentality, which demands that each of us comply in a "normal" way or be deemed a threat. Mostly the cops get away with it. Sometimes they are held accountable. Rarely they are charged with criminal conduct.

It happened last week in Bessemer, AL. It's going to happen next week too, somewhere.

Donald Ray “Hambone” Wilson, an African-American man has schizophrenia. This fact was known to the police. He was shot in the chest.

In this video, he is surrounded by police as he holds a steak knife. He is clearly in mental health crisis and as the police engage into close proximity, they become in danger of being stabbed. Until the police got so close, no one was in danger.

At one point he makes a little fake lunge, then stands still. He is then shot.

As I have written about before (Milton Hall in Detroit, Kajieme Powell in St. Louis), a psychiatrically disabled person with a knife presents intense complications for the police. Shooting the individual, however, has to be an absolutely last-ditch response.

The first response should be to keep distance and employ patience.

The second response should be to use non-lethal force: takedowns, tasers, beanbag rounds. To me, these are a DISTANT second. To a law enforcement professional whose opinion I respect, they are a closer second. Either way, they come LONG before shooting someone in the chest.

I see these stories every week, sometimes multiple times a week. They frequently, though not exclusively, involve people of color, and I do not want to erase that. These are stories about the deadly (or near deadly in this case) intersections of race and disability. They need to be put together so that the patterns emerge, rather than the individual cases standing out as aberrations.

That's my plan for the next 6 months. Put these stories together. More to come soon.

I have a new piece up at The Chronicle of Higher Education on how academics NOT in critical race theory, African-American studies, modern US history, etc. might teach about Ferguson. My attitude is that if we apply ourselves to the sources, in this case the Grand Jury testimony, we'll see a lot we can share.

Now, in the wake of Ferguson, we have some work to do. On Twitter, academics have been organizing classroom topics under the hashtag #FergusonSyllabus. Here’s my suggestion to add to the list. The entire testimony of Darren Wilson is available online, along with the rest of the grand-jury evidence. Those are our primary sources. Whatever your disciplinary lens is, you’ll find something worth saying once you engage with those documents.

I offer a few examples in the piece, then suggest we all go ad fontes. To the sources!

UPDATE: Over at Slate, Katy Waldman expands on similar themes.

Of course, Wilson’s characterization of Brown doesn’t really fall into this tradition of literal, deranged belief. Instead it emerges, if unwittingly, from a long history of equating blackness with devilry. Literature is rife with examples: In Othello, the Moorish antihero is relentlessly compared to a demon. (When he swears that Desdemona has “gone to burning hell” for her unfaithfulness, another character rages: “O, more the angel she/ And you the blacker devil!”) Rudyard Kipling’s odious poem “La Nuit Blanche” has the narrator recount a ghastly dream in which “a huge black Devil City”—possibly representing Africa—“poured its peoples on my path.” Nor is contemporary culture immune from the association: In 2013, the History Channel infuriated liberal viewers for airing a miniseries, The Bible, that cast Satan as a Barack Obama lookalike.

I wrote it because of the media discourse I saw surrounding the death of London McCabe. I wrote it because that framing was not unusual when this kind of murder happens. I wrote it to provide a tool, a pre-made critique, ready to go when another horror broke.

Here's that next horror.

A mother in England smothered her three disabled children, killing them. The reporting has been heavily focused on the pressures she was under. Here are a few links representative of the larger reporting.

The Telegraph - "The unimaginable sorrow of Tania and Gary Clarence."

The Daily Mail -  "Court papers reveal 'unbearable pressure' put on Tania Clarence" and "Heartbroken banker stands by wife who suffocated their three severely disabled children after being 'tipped over the edge by social workers and doctors'"

On BBC.com, Mik Scarlet (in a piece critical of the media discourse), notes the frequency of the words, "mercy killing." Scarlet also quotes two people with Spinal Muscluar Distrophy 2, the condition that the three children had:

Katherine Araniello, who has type 2 spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the same condition as the Clarence children that died, stated on her Facebook page: "This mother acknowledged and understood what she had done and appears to have planned to kill her children... so my overall feelings on this story are the terrifying moments those poor children had. I can relate to zero physical movement, not being able to wave my arms in protest, let out a scream, defend myself."

Mark Womersley, who also has SMA type 2, posted a video on Youtube in which he expresses how deeply the case has affected him. He raises his worries about the media portraying the condition as an "infant killer", even though he has reached the age of 47. He believes the charge of manslaughter did not fit the facts of the case as they came out during the trial. He also raises his fears over the use of the term "mercy killing" during the trial and what it might say for disabled people in the future.

It is not my intention to demonize Tania Clarence or demand that her husband reject her. But the vast majority of the coverage is about Tania. I ask myself, I would like you to ask yourself, "where did the victims go in this narrative?" Who will speak about and for them?

The three children transform in these stories into abstract subjects, the subjects of state intervention (which seems to have been poor indeed in this case), the subjects of parental stress, inert objects to be smothered beneath a pillow, silenced forever, and then written out of the story. It's Tania's story, it's about her, her pressures, her (genuine) mental health issues, her marriage, her husband's reaction, the court's mercy in charging only with manslaughter, it's all about her.

And it's not that her story doesn't matter.

It's that her children deserve their story too, and they deserve it first, and loudest.

This is going to happen again. Probably soon. Be ready to demand that we tell the victims' story.

It's been quite a week. On Thursday, I woke up and could find neither clip nor transcript of Daniel Handler's racist joke at the National Book Awards. So I made one and offered a few comments. I said:

For a powerful white author to make a watermelon joke when handing out an award to a black author, the message is - no matter what you write, no matter what you do, no matter what you accomplish, you will always be a BLACK author, not just an author.

Handler has since apologized and put a lot of money where is mouth is, supporting We Need Diverse Books. And we do need them. Please donate if you can.

The piece went viral, at least in terms of this blog's history, with tens of thousands of views.  It's been cited on Salon, The Mary Sue (one of my favorite sites!), The Guardian,  Lee and Low publisher's blog, Raw Story, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, Melville House Publisher's blog. The SF Chronicle referred to me as "many on social media." That's Dr. Many on Social Media to you!

Anyway, it's been lively. Thank you all for reading and sharing.

But what I really want you to read are these two guest posts.

• Ellen Arnold on the way we compare historical disasters. It's not about size of the disaster, but the human scale. Each life matters.
• Amy McNally on what you should when someone tells you they are considering suicide.

I don't do many guest posts, so believe these are worth your time. Please share them if you will.

Other posts:

I wrote my first piece for Reproductive Health Reality Check with a related blog post, as I continue to try and develop a better pro-choice, pro-information, anti-eugenic rhetoric. I'm hopeful that RHRC will be a good space for that project.

I wrote a long blog about definitions of autism and the pushback against Seinfeld. I feel it comes from a poor understanding of disability, one with dangerous consequences.

I wrote quick pieces about questions for the NEH Chairman and the death of Tanesha Anderson - Another Disabled Person killed by police.

As always, thanks for reading! See you next week.

 
"Perhaps the biggest thing missing from comparisons between Ebola and the bubonic plague, or in fact between any of these large scale tales of epidemic and pandemic disaster, is the human scale."

I am an environmental and cultural historian—I work on the Middle Ages, and one of the classes that I teach on a regular basis is a class on the Black Death that is, at its core, a course in comparative disease and disaster history. In 2009 I started the class with discussions of Swine Flu. In 2013 we began not with the Middle Ages, but with parts of Susan Sontag’s “AIDS and its Metaphors.” We read about cholera, and the flu pandemic, HIV/AIDS and cancer. I ask students to make links across time and across cultures, to think about the ways that humans interact with ecosystems of disease and the ways that human society constructs ideas about illness, how groups and individuals respond to disease, and the role of culture in human/disease interactions. And so I have been following coverage of the recent, devastating Ebola outbreak not only as a concerned citizen, but also as a teacher interested in the ways that people imagine and interpret disease.

The ways that we as moderns understand, interpret, and talk about disease have long and complex history. The history of the way that we frame and interact with diseases has taught us important lessons about both human health and human cultures. And modern disease studies have helped us learn a LOT more about the Black Death. Recent DNA analysis of both human remains and microbes and cemetery excavations have rekindled academic and popular interest in the medieval plague, and have added a lot of nuance to many public discussions of the deadly disease. And so, as I read Mark Perry’s essay using the panic over Ebola to direct readers to that most famous of pandemics, the Black Death, I was hoping for, well, I don’t know.

The article rehashes all the old standard stories about the plague— it was “caused” by Mongol armies using biological warfare; it swept uncontrollably through Europe, was composed of three diseases (here he is wrong), it devastated the economy, led to persecutions and hatred, and, (and here’s the core) killed an unimaginably large number of people. (I could write a whole essay on how misguided and oversimplified these main, predictable stories are, but I won’t.) Instead, I’d like to focus on the ways that we are missing real opportunities to do meaningful historical comparisons when we use death tolls as our primary index for comparison.

National Geographic

The main comparative point that Perry is making is one of death toll—a statistical comparison. Ebola, he argues, “is not nearly as deadly as [the disease] which, well, plagued the world in the 14th century.” He is not alone in this. Despite some more nuanced attempts to compare specific public health policies (see Rebecca Rideal’s take on UK border control efforts and this NPR piece on some recent research), comparisons between the plague and other diseases fixate on the death toll. Ty Burr, writing for the Boston Globe, amidst an interesting essay on cultural expectations of disease, writes: “Some perspective: The Centers for Disease Control estimates that influenza kills 3,300 to 49,000 people in the United States per year; statistics are much debated, but the point is that they’re more. Bubonic plague — the Black Death of the Middle Ages — reached London around Nov. 1, 1348; by February, 200 people were dying per day. The 1918 influenza epidemic that killed 30 to 50 million worldwide landed in Boston at the end of August; by the end of October, 195,000 Americans had died.” A National Geographic article presents this graphically, with lives lost turned into giant lotto-balls (blood-red to signify blood and danger).

Shocking, yes—but helpful? Perhaps the biggest thing missing from comparisons between Ebola and the bubonic plague, or in fact between any of these large scale tales of epidemic and pandemic disaster, is the human scale.

Today we routinely hear disasters quantified and measured against one another. Natural disasters are newsworthy when they are “the worst” or “the highest,” droughts when they are “the most extensive.” Material damages are quantified, to determine if disasters qualify as the “most expensive” (or problematically, expensive enough to merit aid), and human loss of life becomes part of the tally of scale. Given our new record-keeping abilities to assess and compare both scale and impact, and also the reality of increasingly global scales of environmental disasters in the post-Industrial (or anthropocene) world, it is unsurprising that generally only the “worst” medieval and pre-modern disasters are commonly discussed: Pompeii, the Black Death, the diseases of the Columbian exchange, etc.. All disasters, no matter their scale, affect individuals and communities, and leave their traces in communities, families, ecosystems, and human memory.

Source: http://www.andrecarrilho.com/

In August, André Carrilho drew a striking illustration (discussed here and reproduced left) of media response to the Ebola outbreak. What makes this image so powerful, besides the painfully brutal way it throws our racism at us, is the de-individualization of all the sick people. These people are identical (save color) in their identities as suffering bodies. Their personas eclipsed by their identities as victims. They are statistics.

Here is where the premodern can help—can open up conversations about not just mass mortality, but about individual response. Though so many modern accounts of the Black Death focus on gruesome deaths, medieval writers remind us that past the fear and the pain, there was another dimension to the plague—it created absences.

In the wake of the plague, Petrarch wrote an agonized letter:

“Where are our dear friends now? Where are the beloved faces? Where are the affectionate words, the relaxed and enjoyable conversations? What lightning bold devoured them? What earthquake toppled them? What tempest drowned them? What abyss swallowed them? There was a crowed of us, now we are almost alone. We should make new friends—but how, when the human race is almost wiped out; and why, when it looks to me as if the end of the world is at hand? Why pretend? … Look, even as we speak we too are slipping away, vanishing like shadows.” (Petrarch, letter from Parma, tran. In Horrox, The Black Death, 248-249).

Each dot on a map of Ebola victims was a whole person, with a family and a faith and friends—each person killed in this outbreak leaves giant holes in their family, their local economy, and their social networks. Though it is tempting to look to the medieval world and see in it a “there but for the grace of God and penicillin” lesson, it is much more fruitful to see in the voices of long ago reminders that all lives matter, that diseases on all kinds of global scales are about the sickness, susceptibility, salvation, and (one hopes) survival of individuals.

• All-new 2015 Nissan Murano set to arrive December 5th at Nissan dealers nationwide, with a starting M.S.R.P.* of $29,560
• New 2015 Nissan JUKE, with revised styling and enhanced standard content, shown for first time in North America, goes on sale today
• New JUKE "Color Studio" personalization program announced – offers unique way to customize Nissan's popular sport cross with a choice of 12 accessories in a range of 8 colors
• Press conference also highlights Nissan's ongoing support of the Heisman Trophy Trust's charitable efforts

A few months ago I wrote a CNN piece about the use of disclaimers as a way to get around offensive humor.

My piece and subsequent blog was specifically on the context of  Down syndrome jokes and disability humor. I believed, though, that there's a broader language issue here. We say something terrible, we bracket with disclaimers, and we get away with propagating stereotypes.

Last night Jacqueline Woodson, who is African-American, won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature for the work, Brown Girl Dreaming. She thanked people for changing the world.


Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, then made a joke about watermelon.


Here's the video clip. And here's my transcript:

Woodson: Thank you for changing the world.

[music]

Handler: I told you! I told Jackie she was going to win. And I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind.

And I said you have to put that in a book. And she said, you put that in a book.

And I said I am only writing a book about a black girl who is allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb from you, Cornell West, Toni Morisson, and Barack Obama saying, "this guy's ok! This guy's fine!"

Alright

[cackle]

Alright, we'll talk about it later.

For Handler, the disclaimer and humor, the wink that he knows he's on dangerous ground, functions to excuse a joke linking to a long racist history of associating black people with watermelon. Handler is a smart guy (I went to college with him, but never really knew him), he knows this history, and he thinks that because of his disclaimer, this is funny.

It's not. Woodson can make that joke about herself. But for a powerful white author to make a watermelon joke when handing out an award to a black author, the message is - no matter what you write, no matter what you do, no matter what you accomplish, you will always be a BLACK author, not just an author.

That's not Handler's intention here, but that's the effect.

And it needs to be called out. It especially needs to be called out by all those other powerful white male authors that populate the internet, have tens or hundreds of thousands (or millions, for Gaiman, who was doing a book giveaway with Handler earlier in the day) of followers on Twitter.

And then Handler can apologize, say that it wasn't his intention to be offensive (which is what they always say) and everyone will just move on. But the apology is necessary. It's necessary to make a loud, public, statement that this type of discourse is unacceptable.

UPDATE - A Few tweets, including Handler's apology.

My job at last night's National Book Awards #NBAwards was to shine a light on tremendous writers, including Jacqueline Woodson... -DH [1/2]
— Daniel Handler (@DanielHandler) November 20, 2014

...and not to overshadow their achievements with my own ill-conceived attempts at humor. I clearly failed, and I’m sorry. -DH [2/2]
— Daniel Handler (@DanielHandler) November 20, 2014

This was written by noted speculative fiction author Saladin Ahmed before the apology. But like me, he knew it was coming. And I'm glad it was coming. 

I'm tired of the racist joke-pillory-apology pantomime. Rather just see people give money and jobs to people of color.
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) November 20, 2014

Update 11/21/14: Handler has reportedly given $10,000 to We Need Diverse Books and promised to match donations up to $100,000. This is a good mea culpa, as such things go, and I'm glad to see it.

Today, sometime from 10-12 (I assume the second hour), the Chairman of the NEH is going to be on air with Diane Rehm. You can listen here.

You can call in.

The Chairman does not talk to me, nor do I expect him to. I'm a nobody. The Director of Communications at the NEH does talk to me, or did, anyway, until yesterday (more on that in a moment). There have hundreds and hundreds of you supporting me in my work on the NEH.

Now I need your support. I need you to call the show. I can't. I'm acting as a journalist here. If I call in, I am trying to get an ambush interview, and that's not ethical. But you, as academics and citizens and people concerned about the NEH can. Please call. Flood the line. Be polite.

Here's why the NEH stopped talking to me.

Dear Judy [NEH Communications Director Judy Havermann]

Sorry, another question. I know these are small things, but I like to get the details right.

On August 26th, Jeff Thomas sent an email to Larry Myers and Adam Wolfson. Thomas asked them to do some "back-of-the-envelope tally of all the 'extra' funds we agreed to provide at OMB Level 2?"

Given my FOIA request, the natural conclusion is that Thomas is discussing money saved by canceling the overseas seminar program.  Otherwise the email would be non-germane. Would someone like to confirm that?

Also, to my knowledge the following numbers have not been made public.

1. How much money will be saved by eliminating overseas seminars.
2. Where that money will go.
3. Whether the total funds spent on summer seminars and institutes will be reduced or maintained at the same level, just re-focused domestically.

I'd obviously like those numbers, but I'd be content to say that the NEH hasn't made them public.

Thanks,
David

Judy replied:

  Dear David,

 We have done our best to explain why we made this decision, and have sent you all the files that we have on it.   I think we will just have to leave it at that. 
Judy

Here are some other things I know.

Bro Adams took over on July 22 and told everyone to cut their budgets.

By the end of August, the Education Division had decided to cut overseas summer programs.

In my FOIA request, THERE IS NO BUDGET DOCUMENT, not even a redacted one. I am genuinely unsure whether they even know how much money they are going to save, and I suspect the number is basically 0. The foreign seminars are, though, usually 5 weeks, which is more expensive, so they may do more shorter seminars and save a few tens of thousands of dollars that way.

At any rate, call in and ask Bro Adams about the seminars. Ask him what programs could have MORE impact than sending high school teachers, especially in social studies, history, and language, to learn and work abroad, to build international contacts. Ask him something.

Thanks.

Response to Seinfeld was varied. From the welcomes (but stop supporting Autism Speaks) to get out! It's these latter that interest me.

First - Here's a discussion about the removal of Aspergers Syndrome as a separate diagnosis, instead redefining Autism as a broad disorder with an expanded spectrum. That's really the subtext for a lot of these pieces.

The general dynamic is that autistic people are welcoming Seinfeld, while parents who are struggling mightily (and I do not deny the veracity of those struggles) want to exclude not only Seinfeld, but by extension anyone with autism who is doing pretty well.

Here's an example from "Age of Autism," an anti-vaccination group linked directly to the kind of "cure-based" discourse I talked about in my CNN piece. The author, a struggling parent, writes: "Screw You Jerry Seinfeld." The complaint is that because Seinfeld is so rich and successful, his embrace of the autism label somehow diminishes the struggles that the author is having.

And you can watch Jerry struggle with basic social engagement and making friends on his new show where he socially engages his many friends, who happen to be the most famous, popular and clever people in the world, on his new show, “I Can't Look You In The Eye or Answer Wh Questions Without Prompting.” No... that's not it. It's called “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” A follow-up to the most famous comedy show of the late 20th century in which Jerry spent many years making witty banter that was frequently entered into the English lexicon. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

That reminds me... do you remember that hilarious episode where Jerry walked around his apartment on his tiptoes while flapping, wiped his poop on the wall, got lost for three days in Manhattan, was tortured by bullies and then had a seizure? Me neither.

Because again, Jerry apparently has the kind of autism that is not dysfunctional, even though autism by definition is dysfunctional. He has a non-impairing impairment. Because autism, it’s just a different way of being– even though, again, by definition, being listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental DISORDERS means that it is a disorder... which means that it is disordering, dysfunctional and impairing.

 In the Down syndrome community, which is of course chromosomally based in terms of diagnosis so there's less wiggle room, there's a general tendency to cheer success. My child can do many things, but I know many people with Down syndrome with MUCH better speech and hence greater degrees of integration. I would never want to exclude such people from my son's community. But here, from Age of Autism, we have a voice trying to separate the successful from the struggling.

And it's not just the crank groups like Age of Autism. In Salon, Columbia University creative-writing professor Marie Myung-Ok Lee wrote essentially the same piece, only with clearer prose and less ranting.

Seinfeld said he hopes his announcement will help diminish the stigma of autism, an unequivocally laudable intention. Retroactively self-diagnosed adults or high-functioning autistics like Temple Grandin indeed may be living proof that one can overcome huge obstacles and live with and even flourish despite autism. Every day, dead people, too — Mozart, Newton, Einstein — are also retroactively diagnosed with autism.

What I fear is that these public faces of autism will allow society, and more important, policymakers, mentally off the hook. You can have autism and get a Ph.D.! It helps you write jokes! Your charming quirks and aggravating behaviors are now explainable. 

To veer to the other end of the spectrum, the sporadic — but steady — news of overwhelmed parents killing their own children warns of a crisis building in our own homes. Many of these cases have been mothers, but before we explain it away, as it has been, with gendered suggestions of mental illness, attention seeking, etc., let’s also remember this story about a father — and high-ranking former Bush official — who shot his autistic 12-year-old son in a murder-suicide inside their suburban McLean home.

Three problems.

First, again, the discourse of overwhelmed parented in these murder cases is not the dominate correlation. The dominant correlation relates to ideology about the fundamental nature of disability.

Second, Lee doesn't dig into the evidence behind the "news of overwhelmed parents," but just assumes that this discourse is accurate. It isn't.

Third, although I believe that Lee and the others genuinely fear that, somehow, a highly successful person with a disability might somehow erode support for those whose delays and difficulties are more acute. They aren't just making up the fear. They feel it. But why? No one cites any examples or evidence for how a successful person with autism might erode support for those for whom the challenges are more acute. As near as I can tell, it's just a gut feeling. I think it's mistaken.

The author suggests:

Being a parent of a child with severe autism in no way diminishes my respect and admiration for Jerry Seinfeld and others striving for autism acceptance. What I am proposing is separating the high-functioning end of the spectrum — perhaps calling it something else — so that we can focus on the urgent and looming issue at hand.

We had that. It was called Asperger's Syndrome. The Aspie diagnosis was a point of identity for some inside the community, but it was deemed non-scientifically accurate because there was no clear line between Aspie and Autism. Rather, there's a very large spectrum. That's our best understanding of what the condition actually is. How it makes us feel shouldn't override the science.

And here's the part where my critique of Lee gets personal. She's at one of the great universities of the world. She has a book coming out on the future of medicine from Simon & Schuster. And she concludes:

It’s only a matter of time before another child is killed, and we won’t even remember their names. We need to call autism what it is: a public health emergency, no less deadly and devastating than Ebola.

She's right that it's only another time before another child is killed. It's not, though, a public health emergency. It's a discourse and representation emergency. It's a political emergency. It's a language emergency.

I see Seinfeld's coming out as a positive, helping to shift the conversation, at least potentially. I see this Salon piece as very troubling, feeding into a kind of othering that isn't helpful and might, in fact, correlate strongly with those who do the worst things imaginable to their children.

I have a new piece up at Reproductive Health Reality Check. It continues to explore the themes of how we generate a new rhetoric for people who are pro-choice, pro-information, and anti-eugenics.

It takes as its lede a story about a woman who wishes she had aborted her child with Down syndrome, born these 47 years ago. Rather than condemn her choices then or her wishes now, I try to unpack her narrative to think about what it says regarding hardship and advocacy.

I write:

Relf wrote that while she loves her son, she wishes she had aborted him. For parents of fetuses with Down syndrome, Relf implied, abortion is the only way out of a lifetime of obstacles.

The broader Down syndrome community of parents typically responds to stories like these with outrage or sadness. Instead of acknowledging the validity of the hardship narrative, we often chooseto promote superficial cute and happy imageries of life with Down syndrome, as if to acknowledge the challenges would be to promote aborting fetuses with disabilities. We, too, have bought into a narrative of limited, inaccurate choices: that someone must either constantly celebrate Down syndrome with no discussion of the difficulties it can present, or effectively be supporting eugenics.

I argue we need something more complex:

So here we have two different false binaries. Neither is true; both remove the agency from people with Down syndrome. Furthermore, neither identifies the clear missing piece—what if, instead of leaving people like Relf isolated and struggling, we identify ways to build a robustly inclusive and caring society? What if we fight to expand access to support for all parents? We can break these dualistic fallacies apart.

So that's where I stand, at least for now, as my understanding develops. Working to make a better world. Working to make sure prospective parents get the best information possible. And then respecting whatever choices such women make.

So here's the pattern. The family of a person with psychiatric disability decides that they need help. The disabled person isn't taking their medicine. They are perhaps seeming violent or might become violent. The family calls the police to ask for help getting the person to the hospital.

Police arrive. The person with the disability behaves in an unpredictable manner. The person with the disability behaves in a stubborn manner, not complying with orders the way a neurotypical person might. Police get violent. The person who the police were there to help dies or gets seriously hurt.

Add race to the equation, and the likelihood of that violence intensifies.

The newest victim of this pattern is Tanesha Anderson.

The Family calls for help:

Officers were called to the home after a family member reported that Anderson was disturbing the peace.
Patrolmen had lengthy discussions with Tanesha Anderson and members of her family. Everyone agreed she should undergo an evaluation at St. Vincent Charity Medical Center, police said.

The police say:

As the officers escorted Anderson to the police vehicle, she began actively resisting the officers," police spokesman Sgt. Ali Pillow said in a press release.
Officers placed her in handcuffs and she began to resist officers' attempts to put her in a squad car, Pillow said.
"The woman began to kick at officers," he said. "A short time later the woman stopped struggling and appeared to go limp. Officers found a faint pulse on the victim and immediately called EMS."

Anderson's brother says:

Two male officers escorted Tanesha Anderson, who was prescribed medication for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, to the police cruiser. She sat herself in the backseat but became nervous about the confined space and tried to get out, Anderson said.
Police struggled to keep her in the car and an officer eventually drew a Taser. Joell Anderson said he begged the officer not to use the weapon on his sister.
Tanesha Anderson called out for her brother and mother while an officer repeatedly pressed down on her head to get her into the backseat. After several attempts, the officer used a takedown move to force her to the pavement, Joell Anderson said.
The officer placed his knee on Tanesha Anderson's back and handcuffed her. She never opened her eyes or spoke another word, her brother said.

Here's the thing I want to emphasize: At no time was anyone in danger. At no time was Anderson a danger to herself or others. The police just decided that because she wasn't complying, it was time to tackle her and she died. An accident, yes. The police didn't intend for her to die.

They just intended to control her to the ground, and now she's dead.