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ROUGHLY EDITED COPY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
University of Illinois at Chicago
UIC Forum
Not in my Class(room): Race, Disability, and the Dilemmas of Difference
February 14, 2013
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:
Dillon Reporting Service
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>> FRANCESCA GAIBA: Welcome, everybody. We'll be starting soon. They're
bringing more chairs, thank you, to the staff of the forum. If there is an empty seat next
to you, maybe you want to wave so that other people can see that there's seats available.
Maybe you can scoot in towards the center so it makes it easy for the late comers to find
a seat. And don't hurry people at the buffet. Take your time. Welcome, everybody,
and thank you for coming to this event. It's called Not in My Classroom: Race, Disability,
and the Dilemmas of Difference.
My name is Francesca Gaiba, and I am the Associate Director for Research at the
Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. I coordinate IRRPP's Race And series,
an intersectional series that this year focuses on race and disability. This series is meant
to help us reflect on the intersections of race, ethnicity, disability, education, class, and
other identity markers that are sometimes markers of oppression and discrimination, but
are also the source of our beauty, strength, and humanity.
When we think of identity intersections, we recognize that some people carry on
their body multiple markers of beauty and oppression. For example, people of color
with disabilities, immigrants with mental health needs, developmentally disabled youth in
prison, we are people who are non-native speakers of English. However, the series is
also especially meant to help us reflect on another meaning of intersectionality. As we
fight for social justice, how do we widen our vision and consider how our struggle for our
own very important goal affect other oppressed groups? Or more vulnerable people
within our own community? For example, as we fight for racial justice, we need to
consider how our critique of the disproportionate number of students of color in special
education, which is the discussion we're having today here, affects the lives and
opportunities of students who need the services and support. How do we have this
conversation without discounting and undermining the work of disability rights activists of
the past decades but rather support and extend that work? And as advocates for
disability rights, we need to consider how special education placement affects the lives
and educational outcomes of African American and Latino/Latina students in particular.
How our work for disability rights and for special education can be used and twisted to
create a form of present day segregation in schools.
In summary, as we work for social justice, how do we rise up together? Because
what is the gain in rising up when we push other people down in the process? To have a
complex answer to the simple questions, IRRPP has invited today's speakers who I'm
honored to introduce, Alfredo Artiles is the Ryan C Harris Memorial Endowed Professor of
Special Education at Arizona State University. He co-directs the equity alliance at ASU.
His interdisciplinary work examines the consequences of educational inequalities related
to the intersections of disability, race, social class, gender, and language. He uses the
insights gained from these analyses to advance policies, personnel preparation programs,
and educational systems that enhance the well-being and educational opportunities of
multi-cultural communities. He's the coeditor of the book series Disability, Culture and
Empathy. Dr. Artiles served as Vice President of the American Educational Research
Association. He's an AERA fellow, a Spencer Foundation Fellow and a resident fellow at
the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Dr. Artiles has
been an adviser to the civil rights projects at Harvard University and UCLA, the National
Academy of Education, the Council for Exceptional Children, the Southern Poverty Law
Center, the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation and numerous projects housed at universities
in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. In 2011, Dr. Artiles was appointed to President
Obama's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. Welcome to
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Chicago, Dr. Artiles. (Applause.)
Nirmala is Professor of Social Foundations of Education and Instructional Leadership
at the University of Alabama. Her academic interests are in disability studies, post-colonial
and third world feminist theory, sociology of education, critical race theory and
multi-cultural education. She has published several articles and journals such as
Educational Theory, Journal of Curriculum Studies, American Educational Research
Journal, Educational Researcher, Disability and Society, and Studies in Philosophy and
Education. Her book, Disability and Difference in Global Context towards a
Transformative Body Politic was published in 2011. Dr. Erevelles was the guest speaker
yesterday at the first annual award of the Carlos Dresen Memorial Scholarship in the
Department of Disability and human development at UIC. This scholarship was
established by the Farkas Family Foundation to honor the memory, vision, and passion of
Carlos Dresen. It was established to support educational opportunities for graduate
students interested in the intersection in race and disability. If you would like to
contribute to the scholarship fund, there are envelopes at the front desk. Welcome to
Chicago, Dr. Erevelles.
Their remarks will be preceded and introduced by Federico Waitoller, Assistant
Professor in Special Education at UIC. Dr. Waitoller’s research agenda focuses on two
topics related to collusion of culturally and especially diverse education students, one, the
development and implementation of inclusive education policies, practices, and tools, and
two teacher learning for inclusive education. Dr. Waitoller is currently working on a
research project that examines the impact of Chicago's current educational reforms, for
example, charter schools and accountability, on culturally and linguistically diverse special
education students. He has published work in national and international journals and
edited volumes, and he is the coeditor of inclusive education, examining equity in five
continents. He belongs to the editorial panel of the International Journal of Education
and the International Journal of Home Schooling.
Dr. Waitoller also was honored with the American Educational Resource Association
minority dissertation fellowship and most recently with the Faculty Fellowship from the
Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. Thank you, Federico, for being here.
(Applause.)
The speakers will present until around 4:30, after which we will have time for
questions from all of you until 5:00 p.m. Feel free to eat and drink during this event.
We do not want you to be hungry and restless, waiting for the event to end so you can
get some food.
I'm also happy to let you know that there are gender neutral bathrooms in this
building. I have been involved on a campus campaign to advocate for more gender
neutral bathrooms, which are safer for transgender people.
IRRPP would like to thank today's co-sponsors, the College of Education, the Learning
Sciences Research Institute, the Department of Disability and Human Development, and
the Disability Resource Center, who is providing sign interpreting and captioning. And
thank you, also, to our personnel.
I personally would like to recognize the work of faculty who have advised and helped
this series: Liat Ben-Moshe is here and Federico Waitoller as well as the faculty who
served for the last two years also, for the Race and Sexuality series, Lorena Garcia, Alicia
Phoenix Matthews, and Guise E. Ready. I finally thank our dedicated staff in IRRPP, Ryan
Viloria, Delaina Washington and Zach Jensen, who make organizing our programs all the
more possible and also enjoyable. Please join me in welcoming our speakers to campus.
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(Applause.)
>> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: Hello and welcome and thank you for coming
tonight in this romantic evening of St. Valentine's. I'm assuming some of you brought
your date here. If you did, I would reevaluate your sense of romanticism. This is very
poor judgment. The topic for today, my goal for today is going to be to pave the way for
Alfredo Artiles and Nirmala Erevelles talk and I am going to try to introduce the talk and
contextualize it within the Chicago context and I'm going to be referring to this topic as
the miner's canary, and I'm using this metaphor to indicate that this proportional
presentation to students does not just indicate a problem to minority students but
actually signals and warrants us about larger inequities that are happening in the
educational system and continue to happen across history.
So my agenda for today is very short. I want to provide a definition, what we mean
by disproportional representation of minority students. I want to show some local and
also global trends because it's not just an issue that happens in the United States. And
also just to place some future research questions for us Chicagoans. So let's start with
the definition of what we mean by disproportional representation. Usually we mean
that unequal proportions of culturally diverse students in special education programs that
usually involves two patterns associated with this. One is underrepresentation.
Another one is overrepresentation. If we translate this paragraph to more simple
words, we can say that there are certain groups of students are represented in
disproportionate large or small numbers compared to other groups of students. So for
example, African Americans will be disproportionately represented as disproportionately
large numbers compared to whites in disability categories, and we'll get to that at one
point, in a minute.
And I'm going to be focusing mostly this talk on overrepresentation, so that would
mean disproportionately large number of minority students. And overrepresentation
tends to be in what we call the high incidence disabilities. These disabilities are also
more subjective categories. Why they're called subjective is because usually they don't
have -- they don't show physical signs of disability and they're also identified as
professional judgments in schools.
These disabilities include emotional disturbance, intellectual disabilities, other health
impairments, specific learning disabilities, and speech language impairment. What's
very important to know about this group of disabilities is that they compromise 90
percent of entire enrollment of special education; they encompass the largest percentage
of special education students.
Now, what is very interesting about trends when you look just locally within districts
is that geography plays a huge role on identification patterns, and I want to show this.
So what I'm going to be showing you is relative race ratios, and basically their relative race
ratios is the likelihood of a student from one racial group to identify with one particular
disability category compared to another group or another racial group. Usually the
group is whites, the dominant groups, sometimes it's all students in the entire population.
So you're going to be seeing these race relations, I will translate those for you.
So if we see at the national level, if we aggregate all the data from districts and from
states and from schools, on one body of data, what we found is that African Americans
are twice as likely, the number two there in parentheses indicates that, to identify with
emotional disturbance of white students. Intellectual disability categories, African
Americans were more than 2.7 percent likely to identify with intellectual disabilities and
1.5 more likely to be identified with specific learning disabilities of SLD. But at the
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national level, African Americans are not the only ones overrepresented. We also find
that Native Americans are overrepresented in certain special education categories. 1.7
more times likely than white students to be identified with emotional disturbance, 1.6 for
intellectual disabilities and twice as likely to identify as specific learning disabilities
compared to white students. So what gets interesting in this analysis is when you start
noticing the difference between a state level analysis and national level analysis
circumstances so the national level data may show something and you may find very
different patterns at state and district. So let's look at the context of our lovely State of
Illinois. In Arizona, African Americans are also overrepresented across the category of
intellectual disabilities. What you see there, is MID and MOID and SID are different
levels of spectrum of intellectual disabilities, mildly moderate, and the last one is severe.
And you'll see but mostly in the mild intellectual disabilities studies in the most subjective
category. But note that they are overrepresented across the emotional disturbance
category as they were at the national level. Similar happened with Native Americans
who are overrepresented in the severe intellectual disability, twice as likely that one
student would be identified in this category and the specific learning disability as well.
But note again that Native Americans are not overrepresented in the emotional
disturbance category in Arizona. Now, where it gets interesting in Arizona is that
Arizona is a state that has a large Latino population and also a large English language
population. So when we look at data in Arizona, we also found that English language
learners are overrepresented in special education categories. They are 1.8 times more
likely to be identified with a specific learning disability than white students and 1.6 times
likely to identify with disability, mild intellectual disabilities than white students. So the
difference between the state and national levels. And when you go to Illinois, you also
see some interesting trends. You see that African Americans in Illinois are 1.8 times
more likely than white students to identify with emotional disturbance, but when you
look at intellectual disability categories, there are more than 2.5 times more likely than
white students to be identified in this particular category.
What is interesting in Illinois, what I'm going to show you in a second, is that we start
seeing that there's white students overrepresented in special education categories, but in
very specific disability categories. This is white students compared to all students in
population, and we see that white students are overrepresented in other health
impairments and speech and language. And think about this and think for a minute
about the difference between identified as emotional disturbance or as being identified
as other health impairments. And I keep thinking about that and I will get this back
when I get to the data from Chicago.
In this case, even more interesting, when we look at overrepresentation in other
countries. In Germany, when you look at the schools for learning difficulties, immigrants
are overrepresented in schools, Serbian students are 6 times more likely than white
German students to be identified with learning difficulties, Italians almost 3 times more
likely and Turkish twice as likely as German students. But it's not just Germany. We
can look at England, LD meaning learning difficulties, and BESD meaning behavioral,
emotional, and social difficulties. Students from Irish heritage and gypsy-Roman are
more than three times likely to be identified with learning difficulties that white British
students. In the following category we see a representation also in students from Irish
heritage and gypsy Romans but also we'll see an over representation of black Caribbeans
in the category of behavioral and emotional social difficulties which is interesting as we
start drawing some parallels in the U.S. with students from African background being
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overrepresented in categories that have to do with categories of behavior.
Now this stigma, I don't have time to touch up on this, but we can say Australia also
has an overrepresentation for teachers, students, and for students that speak other
languages than English. In Sweden we also see an overrepresentation of immigrant
students and in Austria we also see an overrepresentation of immigrant students, in
particular for gypsy-Roman students. So geography plays a great place. But what's
interesting about this is all these countries have something in common and also in
common with the U.S. These are countries with long history of special education services,
especially with well-established institutions and also these countries are dealing with
immigration issues as well as the U.S.
So what about Chicago? As you see, I'm practicing my pronunciation of Chicago.
Chicago. So what about Chicago? So I say that the minority students are -- we tend to
compare them to white students. But what happened in Chicago? Chicago is I think
has a unique complex if you compare it to the national level or even compare it to the
whole State of Illinois. The large majority of students in Chicago are African American
and Latino; actually whites just compromise 9 percent of the population. We see all
these trends also reflected on special education involvement. 49 percent of special
education students come from African American background, and 39 come from Latino
background. So what I did, I ran some initial analysis from a project that we're doing. I
began to compare not just African Americans with whites but also with Latinos and vice
versa. So what we found in Chicago, I find different trends, for time purposes I'm just
going to be sharing some with you. We found that African Americans when we compare
them to white and there you see ID compared to white meaning intellectual disabilities
compared to white students and 1.6 times more likely to be identified with intellectual
disabilities. Now it gets interesting when you compare that to Latinos because when
you compare African Americans with the likelihood of Latino to have intellectual
disabilities, that ratio is even higher, is almost twice as likely. But look in the other
category of emotional disturbance. When you compare it to white, it is 1.7 times, when
you compare it to Latino, they’re 3.5 times more likely to be identified with an emotional
disturbance and they're also overrepresented when you look at the whole student
population.
So I told you a few slides ago to keep thinking about this idea that white students are
overrepresented in certain categories. And we'll see here in Chicago that white students
are overrepresented in a speech and language compared to Latinos, and they have the
same ratio of overrepresentation when you compare it to both students. And when you
look at other health impairments, you also see a representation, 2.4 times more likely to
identify with Latinos and 2 times more likely to identify with all students. Now, when
we need to think about this, as our health impairments what it is that they have
uncovered, other health impairments, what we have in common is that both categories,
they tend to be referred because of behavior. Most of the students in other health
impairments, the large majority are students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
ADHD. So we can start thinking about some ideas of why this may happen that whites
and African Americans have different labels when they both might be identified for
behaviors. ADHD, to get a level of ADHD, you need to have a doctor's diagnosis, you
cannot be identified in school so maybe certain groups in society, in this case white, may
have access to doctors to get that label. Also ADHD comes with some perks because
when you take testing, you can take extra time and take it on the side, and these perks
usually carry on to university level so it’s a label that some kids might want to have so
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they gain some privilege as they go to university. And of course, the label of emotional
disturbance is much more stigmatizing because it doesn't have a biological accounts, or
explanation but it's more just because they are acting out. So those are some possible
explanations of why maybe white students may be more likely to be identified with other
health impairments that African Americans and the difference in those categories.
Now, what is very interesting about Chicago, and it was kind of a shock for me
coming from Arizona, remember that in Arizona I showed you that English language
learners were overrepresented in special education categories. In Chicago we have
exactly the same -- the opposite trend. When we look at English language learners in
Chicago, we see they are significantly underrepresented across disability categories and
compare across other racial groups. The race ratio goes from 0.08 to 0.3. They are
very, very small ratios, meaning there's a very, very little likelihood that English language
learners are identified with disabilities which raises questions about how those students
are being served within CPS.
So what we make out of this data, and what kind of questions can we ask in Chicago
from this data, the national, state, and district level? So we have a very unique context
in Chicago with school closures coming up, the Chicago Tribune announced today that
there were 135 schools on the chop board to be cut in Chicago. The increase enrollment
in charter schools and the increased openings of charter schools. So I think that that
poses a very interesting context to look at issues of identification of placement of special
education students. So for example, how do school closures shape in special education
identification and placement, identification meaning who gets identified and placement
meaning mostly about the level of restrictiveness that they're placing. In a general
education class most of the time it's self-contained or in a separate school.
How does the advancement of charter schools shape special education identification
and placement patterns? As schools close and others are open, how the movement of
special education students may change these patterns and how patterns of identification
may change also as we cross neighborhood boundaries and also across the schools.
How and where are ELLs with disabilities served at CPS? What is the relationship
between identification and placement patterns, measures of school quality, and
neighborhood variables? We talk about a topic of geography plays a huge role in
identification in placement pattern so in Chicago we have geographies, not a
homogeneous as we all know here. There are huge disparities across neighborhoods
and there's huge demographic change across too. So identification of placement
patterns may change according to that as well. And how do special education
identification and placement patterns vary across neighborhoods, charter, and magnet
schools? So because we think that geography is so important on identifying these
issues, we think we and our colleagues-- actually just released the word, beginning to
think how to map -- to use special maps to identify these trends. And this is not our
map -- this is just an example, an example from the National Center of Culturally
Responsive Education Systems, the center there Alfredo Artiles used to be the PI, and I
actually used to work here actually, and this just gives an idea of how we start to seeing
these trends and in this case it's looking at issues of poverty and overrepresentation, what
you see there is the black dots indicates -- the darkest dot is the higher level of poverty in
those schools, and what you see, the red areas is where you find moreover
representation. This map is from 2006 and we're trying to actualize with this with
different technology as well. But just as an example, just to let you know, for example,
that poverty is not a very good predictor for identification patterns. And this, the job
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that we're trying to engage, trying to answer those questions, see how those questions
change across first time and across geographical areas. And that's it for me. And I'm
very honored to present the next speaker, Nirmala. (Applause.) And we'll take
questions at the end of the three speakers.
>> NIRMALA EREVELLES: Hello. Can you hear me? I first wanted to thank
the Institute for Race and Policy Studies and Disability and Human Development for
hosting myself and my eight-year-old daughter here today for the last three days, and I
thank Chicago for the good weather, relatively, because I'm from Alabama. And thank
all of you for being here and coming today for the talk.
I also wanted to -- I wanted to say that the impetus for this paper was influenced a
lot by the work of Liat-Ben Moshe, who is here today, and her work on disability and a lot
of that informs this paper and I just wanted a caveat, when I'm going to be using the word
“black” often in the text, and when I'm using the word black, I'm not using it in a very
particular sense but I'm using it in a broader sense to represent people of color for the
most part so that it applies to actually most people of color but particularly African
American and Latino youth.
The title of my paper is Cripping Jim Crow, Disability, Dislocation, and the School
Prison by Plan. I'm going to read, I'm going to try to read slowly and I don't have pretty
pictures. My daughter told me to read with expression so I'm going to try hard.
The central focus of this presentation is the removal of marked bodies from public
generative spaces such as schools, to restrictive spaces of isolation, violence, and shame,
such as prisons. I argue that there is an urgency to foreground a much more complex
analyses of these removers that have brutal consequences not only for those removed
but also for the possibility of imagining a more inclusive radical transformational politics.
The title Crimping Jim Crow references the historical practice of legalized removal via
separation that was extended to an entire society based on the social category of race as
theorized in contemporary analyses in critical race theory, and which I now bring to bear
on a more recent analytic crimping from a relatively younger field of critical disability
studies. Crimping according to disability studies scholar Robert McClure, refers in part
to critical, analytical practices that explore, and I quote, “how conscious of ability and
disability are conceived, materialized, spatialized, and populated within geographies of
uneven development and are mapped on to bodies marked by differences of race, class,
gender, and ability,” unquote. In referencing the term cripping, McClure in passing also
marks its coincidental association with the street gang Crips who often become disabled
as a result of gang violence and who are often also confined to incarcerated spaces like
prisons. As such, the title Cripping Jim Crow marks the transhistorical confluence of the
legacy of plantation slavery and Jim Crow, with the more contemporary violence of mass
incarceration, to foreground a complex intersectional politics of race, class, and disability
where incarcerated bodies become profitable commodities in the neoliberal prison
industrial complex of late capitalism.
I want to assert categorically here that I am not just bringing race and disability
together in an analytical marriage of convenience, nor am I making an argument that
racial oppression is like disability oppression and vice versa. Rather, I argue that
becoming disabled or coming out crip is a historical event with different implications for
different bodies that foreground almost simultaneously the painful antagonisms and
promising alliances that emerge out of these historical continuities and discontinuities of
removals, segregation and incarceration. More specifically the locus of this paper is
public schooling. That much celebrated space where children are presumably nurtured
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into productive and accomplished young adults, ripe with the promise of our collective
futures.
But this presentation, once it crosses the threshold of the schoolhouse door, rather
than tripping likely to what's a rosy optimism takes a dismal turn to follow a more brutal
trajectory, the school to prison pipeline, that foregrounds what La Paperson has called the
dirty politics of schooling. Describes the school to prison pipeline as a multi-dimensional
process that funnels large numbers of minority students from the classroom into the
adult prison system. In foregrounding this trajectory, I map out the problematic
continuities between mass schooling and mass incarceration where one subset of
students located at the complex intersection of race, class, and disability find themselves
as social outlaws for almost the entire span of their lives in school and thereafter. Here I
invoke the school to prison pipeline not merely to refer to the education and social justice
systems but also to a complex network of laws, rules, and policies, supported by the
exploitative political economy of late capitalism that Michelle Alexander has called the
new Jim Crow. Though much is being written about the politics of race, class, and
gender in the context of mass incarceration, disability has been rarely mentioned in these
analyses, except for a few exceptions. One such exception is Liat-Ben Moshe's
scholarship, where she points out that discussions relating to mass incarceration seldom
include institutions for people with intellectual disabilities or psychiatric hospitals.
Ben-Moshe, however, is careful not to conflate the prison and the asylum together and in
doing so points to their contrary differences. The prison, though punitive in nature
nevertheless has protection in place like due process and sentencing limits. However
imperfect they may be and they are imperfect. On the other hand, the asylum while
reportedly for rehabilitative care is involved in the involuntary confinement of its inmates,
justified by a medical diagnosis that includes an indefinite time of confinement, often
accompanied by painful treatments, such as extended periods of isolation, physical
restraints, and electric shock therapy. None of this with the inmate's consent.
Moreover, even after the spate of deinstitutionalizations that began in the mid-1950s and
closed down mammoth sized institutions and hospitals, the smaller community living
arrangements that have replaced the large institution continue to warehouse their
disabled clients and are now in isolated communities. Interestingly enough, many of
these former institutions have now been reopened as prisons. Inadvertently reaffirming
the painful relationship between institutionalized rehabilitative care and mass
incarceration. One of the reasons disability is seldom mentioned in critical discussions
of mass incarceration is that there is an implicit assumption that such confinements are
medically necessary for people with intellectual and psychiatry disabilities. In fact, the
two recent mass killings that have occurred in the U.S. in 2012; the shooting deaths of 12
people in Aurora, Colorado movie theater by the 24-year-old James Holmes, and the
shooting deaths of 20 children and eight adults that included the shooter, 21-year-old
Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut has resurrected a
heated public discussion on dangerous stereotypical representations of people diagnosed
with mental disabilities. Margaret Price in her book Mad at School describes similar
representations of the undergraduate student, Seung-Hui Cho who killed 13 people at
Virginia Tech University in 2007 and Steve Casmir Sack who killed 6 people at Northern
Illinois University in 2008. While the media down played the fact that at least three of
these shooters were young, white men with easy access to assault rifles, much was made
of the allegation that all four men were presumably diagnosed with a mental illness and
disability. Price insightfully points out that in each of these public discourses
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surrounding the mass killings, mental illness and disability appears at the dividing line, the
fear some other, that sign of deviance that separates the killers from us.
Disabled people well know the harbors of associating disability with a dangerous
pathology. For example, the deployment of the medical model of disability has justified
the continued segregation, removal, and incarceration of disabled people to special
education classrooms, alternative schools, asylums, and segregated residential
institutions. Similarly, people of color are also painfully aware of these harbors through
their own experience of segregation, removal and incarceration, we are the middle
passage, slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, reservations, barriers, urban ghettos, segregated
schools, voting schools, and ultimately the prison-industrial complex. But even at this
moment of shared experience, I want to mark the very rare painful antagonisms that keep
disrupting a possible easy alliance, as we carefully sort through the problematic
relationships unearthed in our analysis of criminality, danger, disability, class, and race.
In our top working book, the New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how the
relentless focus of the war on drugs by the U.S. criminal justice system disproportionately
targets underprivileged poorly educated African American and Latino youth who are
basically warehoused in prison and who are then released to face lifelong discrimination,
elimination from duties, and other roles and even disqualification from food stamps,
public housing, and student loans. Relegated to the margins of mainstream society,
Alexander argues that this new racial undercst now occupies a political and social space
not unlike Jim Crow, the legalized cause system that emerged in the southern United
States post reconstruction, but that is now justified in race neutral terms. While
Alexander claims that this group is defined largely by race, I argue that this group is
defined at the crucial intersection of race, class, and disability. Interestingly, Alexander
almost intuitively gestures towards such an analysis when she writes that, and I quote,
"The degraded status of Africans was justified on the grounds that Negros, like the
Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race. Perhaps even more lacking in intelligence and
laudable human qualities than the red skinned natives, unquote". Here, Alexander
seems unaware of the constitutive relationship of race and disability where racialized
bodies become disabled and disabled bodies become racialized within the specific
historical conditions of the burgeoning capitalism. Alexander in marking parallels
between Jim Crow and rights and I quote "What it means to be a criminal in our collective
consciousness has been conflated with what it means to be black. For black youth, the
experience of being made black often begins with the first police stop, interrogation,
search, or arrest. The experience carries social meaning. This is what it means to be
black. For the social -- for the racial caste system to succeed, black people must be
labeled criminals before they are formally subject to control. That black youth must be
made, labeled criminals. This process of being made a criminal is to a large extent the
process of becoming black. What Alexander misses in her analysis is that disability
serves as the master trope of human disqualification. And as deployed to give
oppressive credence to the flawed equation that criminal equals bad youth. Here
remapping the historical continuities between -- with earlier times, the simultaneous
process of becoming black and becoming disabled describe uncritically as a natural
deviance, full grounds a context of racial politics of race, class, and disability that is used
to justify the incarceration of outlaw bodies that eventually become profitable
commodities in the neoliberal prison industrial complex of late capitalism. Further, the
historical continuities between Jim Crow, the ugly laws and the contemporary context of
mass incarceration mirror in many ways eugenic ideologies that imagine -- and here I'm
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quoting Richilin Schneider, “a uniquely modern utopian fantasy of a future world
uncontaminated by defective bodies, either disabled, racialized, and/or both at the same
time,” unquote.
According to McRuer, compulsory able-bodiedness as an organizing practice
questions the order of things, considering how and why it is constructed and naturalized,
how it is embedded in complex economic, social and cultural relations and how it might
be changed. It is the practice of compulsory able-bodiedness that requires disabled
people's assimilation via special education, rehabilitation, and assistive technology.
Their removal via segregation, institutionalization and incarceration, or their complete
annihilation, via Euthanasia and the abortion of disabled fetuses. Compulsory
able-bodiedness as a practice of dislocation is the cornerstone of the ghetto, both
hypervisible and invisible in its workings. For example, La Paperson argues that the
ghetto is not where the black people live but rather where blackness is contained. Here
compulsory able-bodiedness controls the boundaries of a ghetto to maintain this racial
isolation, such that the ghetto becomes the excess of white pure space. That which is
left over, the matter out of place. Here liberal discourse is point to the racial and
economic isolation in the ghetto as nurturing a culture of poverty, a natural state of
hopelessness. This is contrasted with the place of universal rights that exists outside the
ghetto where racial and normal enlightened subjects apparently exist. The ghetto is also
imagined as a zone of violence, even though violence occurs, not because of what
happens in the ghetto, but rather because of what is done to the ghetto and its
inhabitants. Moreover because of its fear and pathology there is always the move to
destroy the ghetto, and I think you have a lot of that in Chicago right now with the
rediscripting and moving, to always shift its inhabitants someplace else, such that it
becomes a place that is always open for continuous dispersal of going nowhere for good.
Thus, the ghetto is not just a space but a portable status that can be cast unto bodies,
some are temporarily and selectively branded, others inescapably so, such that if
mapped, it would be a map of absences of what used to be there or perhaps a map of the
condemned. And this is all I'm actually quoting a lot of La Paperson’s work. In La
Paperson’s vivid conceptualization of the ghetto, disability is both hyper visible and yet
invisible in its reappearances and disappearances depending upon the capricious
practices of compulsory able-bodiedness. At one moment it shows its hand in the social
construction of dangerous and depraved pathology. That is here in disability, assigned to
underprivileged bodies of colors, race and class, located within the exploitative political
economy of late capitalism. On another hand, it disappears into obfuscating discourses
that represent this pathology as described as these race and class bodies as innate and
unnatural. In either case the dislocated context of post-colonial ghetto ultimately
results in foregrounding a map of the condemned inhabited by bodies at the intersection
of race, class, and disability, branded, temporarily or permanently as so dangerously
criminal as to require expulsion and/or incarceration. In this way compulsory
able-bodiedness has dislocating practice groups the post-colonial ghetto. It is not a
difficult stretch to see how self-contained special education classrooms and alternative
schools in U.S. public education serve as post-colonial ghettos. Here definitions of
disability as intransigent pathology are used to justify segregation along the axes of race
and class under the questionable guise of special education and rehabilitation. Claiming
and/or passing as normal while maintaining a distance from the real inhabitancy of
disability is amply rewarded in the educational context. But simply we must try really
hard not to be like them. To all those who cannot pass for normal, they always as
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quarantined, the condition of temporary and forced isolation, as in the alternative school,
where students who were deemed at risk for school failure are forced to attend. I wish
to point out here that becoming black and becoming disabled are material constructs
shaped by the political economy of educational opportunity and social segregation that
frame the lives of those students on the fast track to the school to prison pipeline. The
harsh reality is that most of these low income students of color are caught in what Fine
and Ruggles have referred to as circuits of dispossession fueled by economic practices
that systematically funnel public education funding to private enterprises, swell the
profits of testing companies, private vendors, textbook publisher professionals, increase
the police and school and military recruitment budgets. As a result, low income youth of
color slowly disappear from educational spaces that could offer them an alternative to
the numbing promise of lifelong incarceration. This sorting process is further
exacerbated by housing policies that ghettoize those perceived as deviant, rampant racial
and class segregation in public education fueled by regressive economic policies of school
funding through property taxes and through the pedagogical practices of tracking that
disproportionately place minority students in the underachieving schools and classrooms
and you saw that in the data right now.
Most significantly these low income students -- low income schools are also
organized via a prison like atmosphere with little motivation to build and sustain
relationships among students and their peers or between students and teachers or school
staff, all of which are becoming secondary to budget line items assigned for the
management of black and brown bodies. I have argued elsewhere that becoming
disabled is a historical event mediated via political economy of the social. This is also
true in schools. Steel and Aronson have argued that low income students of color
wrestle with the historically direct trends of being viewed as innately deviant and
constantly live in the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that
stereotype. They call it stereotype threat. In the specific context of zero tolerance
policies and its associative practices, the very act of surveillance serves as a physical
representation of a threat, whether or not students are actively conscious fit, and
contrary to popular belief, the threat of constant surveillance does very little to reform
the soul on normalized conduct. Rather it has led to increase raids, confiscation of
student property, interrogations, zero tolerance suspensions and ultimately juvenile
detention centers and prison.
Additionally many incarcerated juveniles are often diagnosed with questionable
labels, such as destructive behavioral disorders, substance abuse disorders, schizophrenia
psychosis, and self-injurious behavior. Conservative estimates claim that about 10
percent of juvenile detainees have recently thought about suicide with 10 percent having
attempted suicide over their lifetime. Moreover as many as 79 percent of juveniles
labeled as mentally ill are thought to meet the criteria of multiple disorders, with 60
percent believed to be displaying symptoms of three or more disorders. Most of these
children receive little or no intervention with a likelihood of treatment increasing if the
juvenile was a non-Hispanic, white younger detainee, processed as a juvenile rather than
an adult and with a past history of treatment. In a case study of the New Orleans
schools, it was reported that both pre and post Katrina students of color with disabilities
lack resources for intervention programs that should have been illegal under IDEA, which
is the Act for Students with Disabilities in School. I want to note here that members of
the psychiatry survivor movement have protested excessive control -- the excessive
control of medical practitioners -- that many practitioners have on the lives of people
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diagnosed mentally ill and have argued that many of the treatments used have deprived
them of the autonomy, respect, and human rights. This perspective, however, gets
complicated when brought to bear those living at the intersection of race, class, and
disability. Thus, for example, Anna Model’s insightful analysis of Meri Nana-Ama
Danguah’s memoir, Willow Weep for Me, foregrounds how this memoir complicates
disabled people’s critiques of the psychiatric model of mental illness because for African
American women with depression, the problem does not lie in the involuntary
administration of questionable treatments, but the lack of access to any form of
treatment at all. In school context McWilliams and Fancher point out that the failure to
evaluate for disabilities while in school contributes to a demonstrated racial suspension
gap that negatively impacts communities of color. They describe what they call a
manifestation review where a team of school officials are required to decide A, whether
the contact in question was caused by or had a direct substantial relationship to the
child's disability, or that the conduct in question was a direct result of the school's failure
to implement the individualized education plan. McWilliams and Fancher report that in
affluent school districts, black students, often poor, are denied the support that an
individual behavior plan can provide because the predominantly white administration
assumes these students are choosing to act out. The matter is further complicated by
the tendency of teachers and school officials to define disruptive white youth as a need of
medical intervention, rather than suspension under zero tolerance policies. This occurs
in context where social class, insurance coverage, and race are key indicators of who
receives treatment and who is disciplined. In this way, it is the reality of political and
economic factors that deny low income students of color with disabilities, not only
corrective and educational supports but also enables schools to refuse to reinstate
students expelled as a result of the zero tolerance policies. As a result, when youth get
in trouble and the school refers them to alternative schools or the juvenile criminal
system, they experience a kind of civic death where they are unable to fully participate in
school processes and also in civic life later on. Low income students of color when
labored with a disability are therefore caught in an oppressive yet contradictory logic.
Put simply as for the illogic manifestation review, for students of color being labeled a
potential super predator, full grant or biological determinism that is absurdly conducted
in couched in a language of choice. In other words, he is a natural born killer, and so he
chooses to kill. On the other hand, white students assigned with a disability label also
foreground the natural deficiency outside the realm of choice, and therefore, worthy of
pedagogical and/or other interventions. Clearly as for this logic, coming out Crip in
public education has different outcomes for different bodies located at the intersections
of race, class, and disability.
There is rarely a biological basis for these labels of disability and at risk. It is also
generally understood that the assignment of these labels are arbitrary, I would say
historical, rooted in the very American grammar that Hortense Spillers, a literary theorist,
writes in her essay, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe. The material consequences of these
assignments are horribly damaging. Students move from segregating classrooms to
alternative schools to becoming school dropouts to becoming completely alienated from
the labor market and the whiter social world and eventually many find themselves in
prison. A humiliating passage along school to prison pipeline.
This phenomenon reproduces what I call the modern or maybe post-modern version
of the middle passage, Jim Crow, that continues the historical tradition of transforming
children of color into diseased, damaged, and disabled Negros, and I'm using a quote from
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Spillers, “deemed incurable and otherwise worthless.” Commodities used to feed not only
the prison-industrial complex but served up again for consumption via the media, through
TV shows like Cops, Oz, and the news. And in another brutal conflation of pleasure and
profit. We are -- we have now the production of another social pathology blamed on
the violent historical construction of special education student living in the post-colonial
ghetto, still bearing the wounds of broken flesh marked by the valiant lashes of history.
While on one hand this pathologization is most definitely unwarranted since it
presumes that deviance is endemic to black bodies, there is another complication to this
argument. Many authors in both education and legal studies have noted that the
material conditions of poverty, inferior educational resources and structural racism
actually create conditions for both diagnosed and undiagnosed learning disabilities and
emotional challenges in mental illness. Failure to be identified with these disabilities
prevents these students from gaining access to services, resources, and supports that
would enable them to tentatively travel through a very treacherous terrain of schooling.
It should also be noted also that these learning disabilities and emotional challenges and
mental illnesses are not the sole purview of low income youth of color. And while
almost all students with disabilities have experienced navigating the special education
system in public education as a nightmare, those from upper-middle class families have
avoided the one way road to lifelong incarceration, as a result of ardent advocacy and
access to outside resources and sometimes just simple class privileges. I'm ending it in
four seconds.
I wanted to end by shifting from a pace of alienation to a more promising
reimagining of community. The possibility of a radical coalition politics for
transformative practices can only happen if we are open to the complex understandings
of the embodied experiences of disability. In a continuum from the most desirable way
of being in the way of being in the world, a radical crip politics, to the most sobering
reality of how it can be experienced in very painful and terrible ways. The difference lies
not just in discursive meanings of race and disability per se but in the historical context in
which it is manifested and it is in our relentless focus on those historical, social and
political conditions that may enable us to move towards more transformative practices.
Thank you. (Applause.)
>> ALFREDO ARTILLES: Good afternoon. I'm freezing. I don't know if it's
the room temperature or what, but I guess on a day like this, it's appropriate to share
with you that it's 72 degrees in Phoenix. That's how much I love UIC. (Laughter).
Thank you, Nirmala for your thought provoking paper and Federico for contextualizing
this topic. I'm thrilled to be back at UIC. I have many friends at this campus for the last
20 years and I look forward to making new ones today. I also want to express my
gratitude to Drs. Richie and Gaiba and her colleagues at the Institute for the invitation to
share my ongoing work as part of the IRRPP's Race and Disability Series, and of course, I'm
grateful to the UIC Learning Sciences Research Institute, the College of Education, the
Disability Resource Center and the Department of Disability and Human Development for
the support that they provided in organizing this and making it happen.
I'm grateful for this opportunity to share this work that is still in progress. The
complexities and consequences of difference for educational opportunity. I focus this
lecture on the entanglements of race and disability. Each of these notions have
complicated and politically charged histories. I'm going to try to keep this here.
Followed in Stiker, I'm interested in looking for the social and cultural ways of viewing and
of dealing with what we so imprecisely call disability. I'm also interested in grappling
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with the notion of race and the problematic ways in which its intersections with disability
become visible and invisible across times and spaces. Scholars have shown, for instance,
how, quote, disability has always been racialized and how race has been conceived as
disability. Often producing multiple consciousnesses in race and disabled subjects.
Schweik documented how what she called “ugly laws” had a sizable impact on people
with disabilities and regulated who could be where, who will be isolated and excluded,
and who will have to be watched, whose comfort mattered. This legal discourse about
deviance and disability also recruited race in systematic ways. It is not accidental;
Schweik argued that enactment of ugly loss which peaked in the mid-1890s emerged with
intensity at the moment of the statutory Jim Crow. It is interesting, however, that
despite these recurrent historical convergences, many scholars are deficiently maintained
at the divide between race and disability and enforce troubling societies in disabilities.
This is indeed a strange case of the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of key
dimensions of marginalized groups. For example, Chris Bell explained that many works
in African American studies have been framed in ablest terms, read nondisabled. At the
same time he concluded that Disability Studies, which is concerned with a social critique
of disabilities, quote, "While not wholeheartedly excluding people of color from its
critique, while by and large focuses on white individuals and is itself produced by a corps
of white scholars and activists" end of quote. Similarly, my colleagues and I found a
profound silence about race in research based on the medical model of disabilities.
More recently narratives of citizenship, particularly in developed nations, are advancing a
discourse grounded in assumptions about ability. Ben Habib explained that citizenship is
defined by whether individuals show themselves to be worthy of membership in civil
society through the exercise of certain abilities. These abilities include, among others,
minimal knowledge of the language of the host country, civil knowledge of laws, and
governmental forms, and economic sustainability through either independent wealth or
employable talents and skills. There is evidence this ablest discourse of citizenship is
increasingly racialized in nations such as the U.S. and Western European countries and
some of that evidence was summarized earlier with Federico’s presentation. These
tropes of racial and ability difference constitute what Baker termed outlaw ontologies, “a
way of being or existing that is thought outside the normal and as such to need chasing
down.” How should we interpret the creation of difference throughout history
particularly around race and disability as a paramount trope of the human condition?
How and for what purposes do scholarly communities manage to maintain what Mitchell
described as the absent presences of race and disabled bodies? What work is
accomplished when race and disability are kept in separate spheres? Stiker reminds us
that society reveals itself by the way in which it treats certain significant phenomena.
The problem of disability -- and I will add race -- are such phenomena. To speak at all
pertinently of disabled and raced people is to disclose a society's depth. These
reflections led me to pursue systematic analysis of the intersections among these outlaw
ontologies, there is indeed an urgent need to conduct this inquiry project given the
historical weight given to these categories and the persistence of this problem in the U.S.
educational system. In other words, this analysis promises to answer Bell's “invitation to
keep race and disability in conversation with one another. It is an invitation to rethink
embodiment and representation.” I argue that a critique of the research under
racialization of disability affords us opportunities to examine particular social groups and
neglected points of intersection of multiple master categories. And ultimately enable us
to understand how shifting views of difference can reify enduring educational injustices in
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the contemporary policy and practice landscapes of U.S. education. One could argue
that research in special inequities in special education has made more visible the
intersections of race and disability. Nonetheless, Hammons reminds us that, quote, this
ability in and of itself does not erase a history of silence, nor does it challenge the
structure of power and domination, symbolic and material, that the term is what can and
cannot be seen. A key premise of my analysis, therefore, is that research under
racialization of disabilities shall be grounded and theories and methods that shed light on
justice concerns for disabled and racialized people. As he explained in this
proportionate representation of racial minorities in special ed has been debated for about
half a century. This is a problem that defies simplistic or leaner explanations. Indeed
the available research paints a complex picture in which individual factors, institutional
practices, organizational forces, as well as physical and bureaucratic pressures contribute
to their racialization of disability. This complex predicament raises intriguing questions
such as how do legal protections for a marginalized group, in this case people with
disabilities, become sources of inequities for another marginalized group, such as racial
minority students. What types of evidence do we need to document -- do we need to
document the ways in which the equity agenda of the IDEA collide with racial groups'
search for justice. Why have we have the research and policy communities given the
bulk of their attention to these all whole problem only the last ten years? Perhaps more
importantly, why have the historical and cultural implementation of race and disability
under complex intersections not been theorized and analyzed in this scholarship? I use
the lens of intersectionality to analyze the bodies of research. The notion of
intersectionality emerged in critical legal studies and has been subsequently developed in
social sciences and humanities, precisely as a resource to understand the complexity of
marginalized people's experiences in stratified institutions and society.
“Intersectionality aims to honor people's multi-dimensional experiences as a response to
the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and
analysis.” Therefore, intersectionality challenges the reduction logic used in traditional
analysis and inspires to engage with a simultaneous influence of race, gender, social class
and other forms of difference as well as the complexities associated with such
experiences. Intersectionality challenges essentialist views of groups, single acts of
analysis and acts as models of identity. McCall stated that intersectionality transcends
an emphasis on separate identity categories and moreover rejects the separatability of
unanalytical, unidentified categories. Crenshaw describes structural and political
intersectionality and reflected on their implications for representational intersectionality.
Structural intersectionality refers to, quote, “the ways in which the women of color at the
intersection of race and gender makes our actual experience of domestic violence and
remedial reform qualitatively different from that of white women, end of quote.
Extrapolating into my analysis, it can be stated that the location of boys of color from low
income background, particularly African Americans and Native Americans, at the
intersection of race, gender, and class makes the experience of disability add to the
education, and efforts to address it qualitatively different from that of white middle class
boys. In turn, political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are
situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicted
political agendas. The need to split one's political energies between two sometimes
opposing groups is a dimension of intersection of disempowerment which men of color
and white women seldom confront. Indeed their specific race and gender experiences,
although intersectional, often defined as well as confine the interests of the entire group.
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For the purpose of my analysis, low income boys of color with a high probability of
identification with disabilities are situated within multiple subordinated groups that
frequently pursue conflicting agendas. This liminal position creates a sort of
intersectional disempowerment that middle class boys with disabilities, low income boys
of color without disabilities, and white girls and girls of color rarely experience.
On the other hand, Coin has described the politics of secondary marginalization
through which marginalized individuals with privilege, in our case male students of color,
police those without privilege. To my knowledge, studies or analysis examining
secondary marginalization processes, either racialization of disabilities, have not been
conducted. These parallels preliminarily drawn between Crenshaw's original analysis
and the critique of the racialization of disability hint at the potential of an intersectional
analysis of this problem.
As I said out the notion of intersectionality as I said to use the notion of
intersectionality in an analysis of research on this problem, it is necessary to know its
limits and understand the critiques leveled against it. Erevelles and Meiner recently
explained that disability is generally included in intersectional analysis merely as a
descriptor, they argue such treatment of disabilities akin what Angela Harris called
nuance theory, in critical race feminism. This theory constitutes black women's
oppression as only an intensified example of white women's oppression, and thus, it
represents the ultimate example of how bad things are for all women. It is indeed ironic
that disability has been largely erased in an analytical tradition whose inspiration is to
examine the complexities of late experiences. As Erevelles and Meiner reminded us,
Quote, disability like race offers not just a nuance to any analysis of difference. Hence,
the use of intersectionality in an analysis of racial inequities in special education research
serves two critical goals. First, it foregrounds the need to pay systematic attention to
the complexity of students' experiences in his research, and second, it advances the
critical project of intersectionality to the engagement with disability in analysis involving
multiple axis of oppression." A challenge conducting an intersectional analysis of
racialization in disability is the inclusion of the three paradigms used to study this
problem, namely the medical, social, and cultural models of disability because theoretical
framings, methods, and explanations of this perspective varies in important ways. The
medical model has dominated race, policy, and practice relative to disability. Although
important advances have been made from the medical perspective that foregrounds the
individual, substantive criticisms have been raised against it. Linton has summarized a
critique as follows that “medicalization of disability casts human variation as deviance
from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and significantly as an individual
burdened on personal tragedy. Society, in agreeing to assign medical meaning to
disability, colludes to keep the issue within the purview of the medical establishment.”
The racialization of disability has been examined largely through this lens and thus due to
its concern with the inner-analysis that foregrounds individual, it disaggregates race from
disability and other margins of difference resulting in a fragmented individual. In turn, the
social model of disability predominately reflected in disability study paradigms offers new
and political understandings of disability which is seen as interacting with social, cultural,
historical, legal, and medical discourses as well as further complicating factors, such as
race, ethnicity, gender, age, and class, end of quote.
Despite the important insights afforded by disability studies perspective, scholars
such as Bell have raised critical questions about its limits; most prominently the role
whiteness has played in the acknowledged production practices in this scholarly
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community. The third model, which I call a sociocultural perspective, also relies on a
social construction view of disability, though its primary concern has been replacing the
racialization of disability in the context of the oppression endured by racial minorities. I
argue that we can benefit from a contrapuntal review of the scholarship produced from
these three perspectives to identify points of contact across these bodies of work not
really apparent. I draw on Said's notion of contrapuntalism in which he linked ideas and
practices that are regarded as being opposites or in contradiction. A contrapuntal reading
is to emphasize and highlight disjunctions, not to overlook or play them down, he said.
For my purpose it is therefore necessary to examine the ways in which intersectionality
has been taken up in disproportionate research that espouses the medical, social, and
cultural models of disability. I realize that the lines demarcating medical, cultural, and
social paradigms of disability are not simple and right, but it is fair to point that there are
tensions between these models. From a contrapuntal standpoint, we are compelled to
cross the linear spaces between these disability lenses, as Said explained in the context of
discussing exile, quote, because the exile sustains both in terms of what has been left
behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees
things in isolation. Consequently, as Said admonishes us, a crucial implication of a
contrapuntal analysis is an unceasing concern with what to read, that is disproportionality
research grounded in seemingly contradicted models of disability, attached to an
unremitting mindfulness about how to read, that is being reminded of the intertwined
and overlapping histories of race and disability as they intersect with gender, social class,
and language. What can we gain from using such a double vision in a contrapuntal
analysis of intersectionality in this research for across medical, cultural, and social
paradigms in social disability? An initial goal is to maintain insights about blind spots in
these literatures and understand how various categories and domains of experience have
been falsely disaggregated and simplified. An intersectional analysis will allow us to
read these categories and realms of experience in an integrated fashion and as mediated
by judicial processes. Moreover a reading of sexuality in this literature will enable us to
claim that disability and race do more than intersect in order to reinforce or intensify the
larger stereotypes. It is not simply that they inherit, acquire, or attribute characteristics
possessed by members of racial groups are interpreted based on a white supremacist
disability. Literal logic and disablement as well as social and political subordination can
also be a process that results in disability in post-racial power relations. To conclude, a
contrapuntal analysis of the racialization of disabilities using an intersection of prison
promises to advance a theoretical understanding of this complex problem and the ways in
which we study it. Following Bell and Said, this political project enables me to keep this
model of disability in conversation with one another. It will ultimately assist us to
reinterpret the cultural dynamics of difference that mediate representations of
marginalized groups. So let me now give you an outline of some of the things that are
coming up in the analysis that we're doing using this perspective.
First, what I call difference beneath the skin and between the ears, the unitary
approach. Although it might be regarded as an outdated perspective in other
disciplines, many studies of disproportionality rest on a unitary logic to intersectionality.
The structural location of race and disability are taken for granted and membership in
these categories is assumed to be enduring and static. This approach endorses a
universalistic perspective in which one variable or marker of difference, such as race or
class, is assumed to be more important than the others. Thus research is said to identify
the one variable that has the greatest power in predicting special education placement,
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typically secondary data sets of the school district state or, less frequently, national levels
are used to gauge the factor that best explains or predicts placement risk. In this logic,
one explanation fits all members of the group uniformly and one explanation is
considered the most important over time. In this approach, the thought that class or
race might have an impact on gender is more a factor of the nature of patriarchy than an
open theoretical or empirical question. The prominence of a single variable is
sometimes imposed through methodological means such as the use of covariance. This
logic was recently used, for instance, in some of the analysis reported by Hibil and his
colleagues in which they were interested in quote how student and school characteristics
relate to the student's placement into special education, end of quote. In this study,
disability was considered an individual based condition that can be diagnosed with
objectivity via technical means. To illustrate, these authors explain that quote this
proportionate representation may be especially likely to occur for those types of
disabilities that rely more on a teacher's judgment and contextual factors than those
types that rely on relatively more objective criteria such as intellectual disabilities or
visual impairments. Building on the force of a unitary individual logic such as teacher
referral decisions are commonly examined as mediated by a single factor, such as the race
of the teacher or school and classroom demographics. For example, a unitary approach
to teacher position argues that teacher judgments of acceptable student achievement or
behavior are necessarily based on the performance of the teacher's particular reference
group which naturally consists of the other students in the school. Thus, the students'
peers with his or her school provide the normative standard for identifying where the
student is -- whether the student is disabled and so is eligible for special education.
Moreover, not only is disability an objective condition, but it is also the result of linear
and unidirectional causal inferences, even though the link between these factors are
often correlational, that move from membership in a racial or ethnic groups to living in
poverty and end up in disability status. Mackmillan and Reshin concluded that quote,
social class and not ethnicity will explain more variants in the rates of protection for these
kinds of disabilities, particularly mild intellectual disabilities, end of quote.
Hibil offers a similar theory when explaining that class and race effects are
compounded by the greater exposure of lower income, quote, African American and
Hispanic children to those factors that themselves contribute to disability identification.
To conclude, these three things stand out in the unitary research, namely, one, the
essentializing of social cultural groups, two, the stripping of historical inferences in the
study of people's actions and decisions as well as ignoring the problematic historical
intertwining of race and disability. And three, the assumption that disabilities are
objective notions largely influenced by biological forces. In this sense the unitary
approach naturalizes the racialization of disabilities and searches for evidence that will
ultimately legitimize racial disproportionality, thus opening a space to claim what Ross
called white innocence. That is, quote, the insistence on the innocence of contemporary
whites, end of quote. Ross explained that white innocence has been consistently used
in legal rhetoric about race in the U.S. to, quote, make smooth the cracked surface of the
law's response to race, obscuring the conflicts and paradoxes smoothing over choices for
which we will later feel nothing but shame, end of quote. I should note that there are
structural conditions in the special ed field that offer incentives for a unitary approach to
disproportionality in this research. For instance, the Federal law defines LD diagnosis as
unrelated to socioeconomic and cultural differences, thus the law implicitly prevents
intersectional analysis of disabilities with other markers of difference. Let me now
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review briefly the other kinds of studies of that I consider hybrid, circular narratives of
intersectionality. McCall explained the original approach to intersectionality analysis is
concerned with critiquing what she called intercategorical complexity. This perspective,
quote, interrogates the boundary making and boundary defining process of
categorization. It acknowledges that stable and even durable relationship that social
categories represent at any given point in time, though it also maintains a critical stance
of categories, it also tends to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of
intersection. Work by disability study scholars have relied on premises from this
perspective. For instance, Therivall linked critical race feminist theory from disability
studies. In their analysis about the historical nexus between race and disability, they
situated the connections between race and disability in historical and post-colonial
context and argued for an intersectional analysis that transcends the limits of unitary
intersectionality. Taking the history of the eugenics movement and it's called conflation
of race with disability, they argue that the continued association of race and disability in
debilitating ways necessitates that we examine how eugenic practices continue to
reconstitute social hierarchies in contemporary context, be it the employment of a
hegemonic ideology of disability that have real material effects on people located at the
intersections of difference, end of quote. Similarly, in a recent paper, I situated that
racialization of disability in historical context of conflation of laws about ugly and
impaired bodies and stress the complicity of research communities in documenting an
association between racial minority status and deviance, illness and repressed abilities.
Sociocultural and disability studies lenses afford a number of opportunities to a more
sophisticated analysis of intersectionality. This is a case, because as I explained earlier,
there is a theoretical apparatus in these scholarly communities that engages with
complexity in more contextualized and systematic ways. Thus, disability studies offer
powerful tools to examine disability as constituted discursively, culturally protean, and
materially across multiple contexts. From this perspective disability is a notion that
requires situated with sociocultural imaginations. It might be too early to gauge stable
patterns in intersectional analysis of racial differences in special education conducted
from these vantage points. However, I comment briefly on some intriguing points from
this analysis that wrestle with at least two vectors of discrimination. It seems this
analysis starts with this compelling critique of disability as historically and bureaucratically
situated showing how definitions evolve over time and reminding us of the ways in which
race, class, gender and disability have been en -- have en tangled histories, all of which is
used to justify an intersectional analysis. In this sense, this work is rooted in an
intercategorical and sectional frame. Nevertheless, a closer look shows that the core of
its analysis is positioned from the vantage point of disability, that is, all of the other
difference markers remain orbiting around the center of the analysis, which is disability.
This is apparently the fact that in depth techniques a social model of race, social class, and
gender are absent in this literature. The closest this work gets at a more balanced
theorizing of these other markers is when that it acknowledges that special placement
was used to maintain the racial segregation of schools in the post Brown era.
Thus on the one hand, disability is socially constructed and is a tool of exclusion for
racial minority students, but on the other hand a discussion of race is restricted to how
this notion is used to oppress the other. In other words, the analysis made visible how
disability is constituted and used, that is through the concerted efforts of cultural,
historical and anthological processes, what it is only the impact of race that is oppression,
what is foregrounded in the analysis. The analysis of disability is mindful of process of
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instrumentality whereas the critique of race with the end result. Moreover, the framing
of disability or socially constructed seems to leak when it is asserted that for the
purpose of exploring the nexus of race and disability, certain categories, disability
categories, may be considered more problematic than others. It is at this point when
the tropes of disability and race converge and the analysis focuses on the racialization of
disability that complications crystalize. First a quasi-unitary analysis emerges since the
discussion relies on studies frayed from a unitary vantage point, the available placement
by student race data are reviewed and discussed to support the argument about the
racialization of disability. But certain structures and blind spots are left intact. By the
way, the scholarship committed to socio-cultural perspective, including my own, has
made the same move in some studies. This way, we are reminded of the Protean nature
of disability as analysis morph from a critique of disability as a socially constructed entity
to a medically based category as embodied in the databases using these studies within
the same intersectional investigation. Although disabilities are theorized and socially
constructed, some categories are called subjective or soft, and a structural argument is
leveled against special education, namely that the bureaucratic and middle class system
oppresses families of color. Agency and within group diversity and low income racial
minority communities tends to be invisible in this logic. It's not surprising, therefore,
that this argument ends up subscribing to an essentialist view of culture. In all fairness,
disability studies and social cultural scholars are aware and do recognize more complex
views of race and disability. They also give analytical space to agency in working with
marginalized communities. My point is that a contrapuntal analytical stance shows that
competing views of race and disability and intersectionalities coexist in their work
produced within each of these scholarly communities. In part, because researchers use
some of this analytical tools of the medical paradigm that we strive to contest in the first
place. Conversely, it is interesting to note that researchers using a medical perspective
have vocationally coopted tools from the disability studies and socio-cultural perspective
to undermine the critique about the racialization of disability. And this was a surprise, I
have to confess, for me. Thus, a contrapuntal reading of this work makes visible the
coexistence of opposing paradigms within and across scholarly subcommunities. For
example, let's go back to McMillan and integration. They evoked a social construction of
disability and ethnicity argument to question the debate about disproportionality. They
made this argument from the vantage point of strengthening measurement precision, a
rhetorical move consistent with the tradition of expertism used in the medical movement
model of disability. Their message is that because race and disability are ambiguous
constructs that are measured in different ways, a degree of caution is needed in
interpreting the meaning and significance of these disproportionality findings. They
explain that race and ethnicity should not be interpreted as scientific and anthropological
in nature yet that is exactly how they are treated in the OCR of overrepresentation of the
dataset they said. They also look into the idiosyncratic ways in which fudge data are
collected in schools, and highlighted the inadequacies of racial categories for capturing
information about the way we think of diversity and liminal groups such as mixed race
students. Their advice was, quote, it might be helpful to specify what aspects of
ethnicity is believed implicated in special education placement and overrepresentation
data do treat ethnicity as an independent variable and essentially consists of comparisons
across ethnic groups, end of quote. I'm a page away from ending and I've been
informed that I'm out of time, so I'm going to hurry up. These arguments are used to
justify the need to control, particularly as often a proxy for social class, which is -- which
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has as I cited earlier is a preferred explanation for the disproportionality debate. It's
interesting that these authors invoke within diversity and racial ethnicity groups to advise
caution in the analysis of overrepresentation of students of color. See, after all, they
remind us these constructs are highly unstable. The implication is that we do not know
who these learners really are. But then within the same paper, these authors summon
an essentialist view of white students and a medical frame of disability to support a
poverty hypothesis. They cite the study in which the prevalence and model of disability
is a various function of social class, the lower the class, the higher the prevalence of
disability. With no occurrence of intellectual disabilities in the higher social class. The
heart of the argument is the announcement that, quote, a study was conducted in
Aberdeen, Scotland involving only white subjects, thereby avoiding the confound of
ethnicity and social class, end of quote. In this scenario, incidents of disability are no
longer problematic or fraught with measurement challenges, as they stated in the same
article, although the study looked at levels of social class, it is claimed that social class is
not a confound. Equally important the authors assume there is no definitive diversity in
white communities, a longstanding trope in the othering of non-white communities that
keep white folks at the center of the finding of consequential categories like ability and
disability. Finally the assertion about the essential nature of white communities lies in
the face of the culture history of Europe and the UK in particular.
So in closing, the initial critique suggests that intersectional analysis grounded in this
contrapuntal perspective has substantial potential for the study of disproportionality.
We need to pursue a number of very complex questions that include things like what
cultural dynamics are in play that produces this first, to what extent does the history of
the racialization of disability and the ways in which intersectionality has been addressed
in their research across the medical, cultural, and social paradigms that constitute what
Fischer called involutionary change, where the construction, treatment, and
consequences of race and disability become more elaborately the same. It's important
to keep that in mind. And in closing a contrapuntal analysis of the racialization of
disability has the potential to stimulate a conversation between similarly opposite or
contradictory disability models and examine the respective ontological assumptions
about disability and race. Such analysis is concerned with answering the question what
can we learn about the nature of disability and race in bodies of work that are deemed to
be distinct and even mutually exclusive. This preliminary analysis identified connections
that are not perceived greatly across these research communities and between
supposedly dichotomized entities such as race and disabilities. To some extent, this
emerging contrapuntal analysis suggested a blurring amount of boundaries among
paradigms, an intersectional prison in turn revealed the protean nature of disability and
race. Sometimes at the service of hegemonic ideologies that reidentify the race and
disability that wouldn't have been perceptible through a single axis analysis. What I've
shared to you only scratches the surface of a contrapuntal intersectional analysis and its
implications, this preliminary exercise has bolted the dimensions of implications for the
preparation of future researchers, the death of analysis of historically charged multi-layer
categories like racial mobility and differences and the fusion of reflexivity in our practices.
But I need to stop here for now, I'm grateful for your attention and you've been a great
audience. Gracias. (Applause.)
>> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: Well, thank you, Alfredo and Nirmala for such
great and thought provoking papers. We are going to open the microphones now. I
have two microphones, one maybe, maybe not. No, you've got two. So we're going to
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open for a Q and A discussion. I think there's someone on the back, where you came
from Francesca.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, this is for professor from UIC. I can't read your
name, it’s too far.
>> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: Federico Waitoller.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: In your statistics for special ed, did you include the
three to five programs, early childhood programs?
>> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: No, that was elementary schools.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 5 to 8th grade?
>> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: To 12th.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: And also do you know how many of those students
in special ed transition from early intervention?
>> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: No, I do not know that. Sorry.
>> FRANCESCA GAIBA: Any other questions?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Professor, I was wondering does the medical model
of disability in your mind set have to be essentialist? For instance, could the physical
and material aspects of race, class, oppression lead to biological manifestations of
disability? I've seen research that suggests, for instance, that undiagnosed learning
disabilities arising from unequal access to psychological and counseling services can lead
to depression and the manifestations of ED in the special education context. Similarly,
stress that African American and Latino children face in the disproportionate -- in
disproportionate ways can lead to -- I've seen research that it can lead to things like
post-traumatic stress disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, which all are biological
manifestations of, to some extent, the ED diagnosis and special education. So I guess
my question is, is the medical model of disability by definition in your mind essentialist, or
can it be intersectional?
>> ALFREDO ARTILES: Thank you. Great question, and I'm sure Nirmala will
have some insights to share from her latest book as well, and she addresses some of
these issues as well. The short answer is no, even though by definition we thought
about it that way historically. Largely there is a great deal of perception about medicine
by design, looking at the individual. But there are some interesting trends emerging in
the last 30 years or so. When you look at the -- what people describe as a biological
term, is the explosion of technologies and the attention to things like using technologies
for the genome project, and knowing the very intricacies of our human body, there have
been an explosion of attention to biological groups of everything that we live and
experience. There are some risks associated with that. At the same time, there is a
very interesting, and refreshing movement across the social sciences and the humanities
to counter this biological term and to problematize it. So I think there are the presence
of holistic medicine that we’ve had for a long time that really challenges it. But also
when you look at work in medical anthropology and some work that has been done in the
sociology of science, that look at medicine as a social and cultural practice, you realize
that the perception we have as a purely objective technical practice of a profession is
not -- there is not such a thing as this professional feel that is entirely dependent of
objective measures. There is a lot of clinical judgment involved in using those
technologies and that knowledge. Just think about the last time you went to the
physician and they just tried to make sense of whatever test they were getting on you,
and try to reconcile sometimes permission. We tend to relegate that outside of
discussions in this field. So I think partly it's because we have assumed that that's the
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case always. It doesn't have to be that way. But it is not until you put on the table this
alternative thinking tools, question, that to disrupt the issues, which is what you're doing
with the question. You don't pay attention to it.
>> NIRMALA EREVELLES: And I think -- yeah, there was another one here,
but I didn't think of that.
It's also -- I mean, the part of the problem with -- I want to be also very clear that
when we are -- when we are offering a critique of the medical model, we are not saying
that there is no such thing as maybe depression or there is no such thing as whatever
these things are. The problem with the medical model is that it takes difference and
pathologizes it, and when it’s pathologized, it makes it seems that there is no ways in
which other social and other factors come in. It's also when you pathologize it, we
immediately -- like what my paper was saying, we immediately attempt certain kinds of
treatments that will not allow for any kind of critical understanding where the person
involved has a space, a voice, and the capacity to interpret and understand these things.
Pathology is negative. Pathology means that you're going to get rid of this thing as soon
as possible. Pathology doesn't allow us to think that we can actually live with -- none of
our bodies are perfect, quote, unquote. None of our bodies are perfect and in fact that
we can actually live with difference in ways that are much more productive than a
pathological argument would allow. And I think that Alfredo's argument about
the -- that we offer the medical model in a way as if it is completely produced via
objective fact, but in reality, medical practice is also so much about interpretation and
translation. Talk to a doctor about an MRI. I mean, an MRI is how different people,
neuro-oncologist, a neurosurgeon and a neuroradiologist read the MRI in completely
different ways. So the fact that our critique of the medical model is the ways in which
disability gets read, as opposed to saying, oh, no, this doesn't exist. So maybe that -- in
that sense, that -- it essentializes -- what it does, the medical model essentializes in some
ways freezes meaning within a very particular framework. And I hope that's kind of the
way I'm answering ->> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: There is a great book by Ann Marie Mol, titled the
Body Multiple, great that really sheds light on a number of the complexities inherent in
the question in case you're interested.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don't really have a question. I just wanted to
see -- I think there's some intersectionality between the three of your talks and I don't
know if anybody is prepared to do this but it would be kind of neat to kind pull the three
of them together in some way. You know, we had some really good strong data at the
beginning, and then we have a lot of theories that really do relate to that data, but it
would be nice if one of you might pull that together.
>> ALFREDO ARTILES: Thank you. Next question.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I actually have a question for each one of you. Is
that okay? I'll start with Federico. So I was curious about, because most of my
research is being focused on France and I was wondering about the absence of France in
the statistics. Is that part of French color blindness, about addressing these issues, or is
there data out when they've had special education since 1909. There's a lot more
ethnographic research in terms of statistics. And then in terms of categories, I was very
interested because in France they talk -- what I've been looking at is how they've been
mainly focusing on eating disorders, which is conduct disorders, psychopathy,
hyperactivity, instability in the psychoanalytic and neurobiological. So when you’re
looking at the overrepresentation of whites in terms of ADHD, I wonder if ADHD is more
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of a complex category in the sense that when it's associated with opposition -- what I've
been seeing is that in France they will naturalize and say that kids are genetically violent
and it's not obviously, that can be very stigmatizing, so that's a question about ADHD
which is related to the question for Nirmala which is about talking about that with
minority students, they're often excluded both because they're seen as more -- they don't
get the services because they're seen as acting out on their own will, but also there's a
form of exclusion of when they're diagnosed, that can also be a form of oppression and
used as a tool to kind of naturalize their inferiority in some sorts so I'm wondering about
the intersection of the kind of double exclusion, of being excluded in services and then
being inferiorized by services themselves.
And then for Alfredo -- what was my question for you? It was really good too -- oh,
yeah, I remember. So in terms of linear models, which I found very interesting what
your work is doing and it makes -- what I'm curious about is this tendency -- and even kind
of anti-racist disability studies which will focus on many issues, okay, African Americans
tend to be more urban environments where there's more lead and that lead can lead to
retardation and breed cycles of poverty. And personally I find that research problematic
in the sense of terms of philosophy science. It's not -- I was at a conference where
someone was presenting this in a context of inequality in the neighborhoods, and it was
in Paris. And I asked them, so how do you even prove that there's -- those environments
are -- they said well we count the number of books that on their shelf. It's a very absurd
kind of practices in terms of establishing this data. So I think in terms of philosophy
science, it's very weak, and also I see it as good -- in trying to defend social injustice,
it's -- it also gives more tools for professors to assume that the kid just ate too much lead
and that's why there's an issue.
>> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: Well, I'm not very aware of data from France, and
maybe that says something, that there isn't much there about France. I'm not aware.
If anyone else knows somebody in France but it's definitely interesting if you have a
source, that's a very fascinating category because I think it's -- it lowers a little bit those
boundaries between subjective and not. Because what you're thinking at the end, how
most of those students are identified with this particular category even when they talk to
a psychiatrist, as Federico pointed out, it's not as objective as you think it may be.
There's still psychometric questionnaires in force, and again when I pointed out on my
presentation, and maybe some parents have more access to those kind of diagnoses than
others, and that's the reason that maybe some kids get into fights with emotional
disturbance or actually gets -- psychiatrists to get a different diagnosis.
>> NIRMALA EREVELLES: I'm hoping I remembered all the complexity of your
question. If not, I'm sure you'll correct me. But one of the things that you have to
understand when you're particularly talking particularly in the U.S. context about the
ways in which race and disability intersect in public education is that historically we justify
the category of race using a very problematic pathological definition of disability. So like
the history, like every time a student gets labeled in the public -- in any kind of
educational classroom, you are bringing to bear a historical reading of how the child is
labeled. In addition to the fact that they are actually real economic resources. I mean,
the most -- I think we were having this conversation today while driving up here to this
hall, that when we talk about health and access to self, like basically the well-being, I'm
not saying healthy, but the well-being of individuals is always caught up with this complex
web of social, political and economic relations. Lack of access to certain kinds of health
care or any kinds of services is always contingent on resources. And so for a child to be
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labeled within a political context and the nature of resources that are offered and also
more importantly the space this individual has to advocate for the kinds of resources he
or she gets because mostly when kids of color get referred, even when they get services,
it's punitive. You either do this or not. And their services are not any of the kinds that
are more empowering, because if you kind of -- I mean, the only people that could really
advocate for medical services particularly are those with good resources. Otherwise
you're considered the charity case, the person on welfare, and so you've just got to be
grateful and accept stuff. So when there is that curious intersection -- I mean, of course
there is this double jeopardy or doubling back which I also mentioned in my paper, that
among psychiatric survivors, we would argue for less intervention, but what happens to
people who don't get any resources at all. But it doesn't mean I'm advocating for more,
how do you say, punitive ways of curing people, but to talk about the ways in which -- and
particularly in education, how do we center children? How do we ask for the kinds of
things they need? It was in the context that's broader than just the labels that we bring
in. Why is it that we have to have labels to in some ways find what kids need?
Because if you don't have a label, somehow this -- some logic about the education
administration that we cannot be nice or we cannot in some ways empower kids, and
that's the logic from where I would answer your question.
>> ALFREDO ARTILES: So we need some preliminary analysis with data from
Chicago, we've got data on lead paint, on toxicity in Chicago neighborhoods, and map it
on the boundaries of the city, and then overlay the areas of the city where you have the
highest identification of African Americans in the category of intellectual disabilities,
which is supposedly the connection between lead paint and disability. And we didn’t
run any heavy duty analysis, it was merely a visual analysis of distribution across space,
but the lack of overlap between toxicity in lead paint and disability was striking. That
doesn't mean that lead paint toxicity is not associated with mental retardation or
intellectual disabilities. It means that it's not a simple linear correlation. And there are
analyses showing that poverty definitely contributes to disabilities, but when you
statistically control for poverty level, people have documented that race makes a
substantial significant contribution, a statistical level to disability diagnosis. So this push
that we have in the field to blame it all on poverty and because communities of color have
this heightened level of poverty and that's all the reason why they need special education
is really not holding when you look at those findings. And there are some interesting
counterintuitive to it trends in the data. If that's the case, why we don't have a
disproportion of placement of Latinos at the national level, considering the level of
poverty at that community. They are not disproportionately represented. They are at
the state and the city levels in some regions of the country but not at the national level.
So that association between poverty and disability doesn't hold in the case of a Latino
community at the national level. So all of this is to say that we really need more
complex understandings theoretically first and endemicologically about how those two
things connect. We're actually now with my team writing a grant proposal to look at
neighborhood and school psychologies to try to understand the interplay between not
only all the dire circumstances of urban and inner city communities but also the assets
and the strengths that they may find that can be used to counter and to make sense of
this complex connection. That is requiring us to look at public health, to look at urban
geography, to look at urban sociology, anthropology beyond the medical model. We do
want to use the information from psychology and medical paradigms because we can find
some useful tools in those fields as well. We should not make this a paradigm war in
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that sense. It's just as Nirmala was explaining, to use it in the perspective that it's going
to make our work more productive
>> FEDERICO WAITOLLER: And to make that case more complex about the
relation between poverty and identification, one interesting finding that's pretty
consistent in the category of emotional disturbance if you’re African-American, you're
more likely to identify with that disability if you go to a school that's wealthy and has
much more resources and is mostly a white community.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, thanks to each of you for these really amazing
papers and I guess my question is about adultism and I'm wondering -- so I think your
answer to the last question started to sort of touch on this. Each of you talked at length
about children, but in a lot of ways the like theoretical apparatus and the frame works
that you used so wonderfully together were sort of, you know, the critical race, the
disabilities studies frame works. And I'm wondering about, I think the appeal to
eugenics, social Darwinism, all of that really should be very instructive about how we
need to be thinking all of these things together. But there's also a way in which
childhood is a really important sort of focal point in the eugenics movement, right? So
I'm wondering if there's sort of more to say about the ways in which one form of
pathologization and criminalization has been so common to infantilize and that there's a
way in which there's something very fundamental about being children, right, that's
always already being bad children because children are not what we're expecting them to
be what they're supposed to be. So thanks.
>> NIRMALA EREVELLES: I think that's a good connection, particularly about
the ways -- particularly in the area of disability. We infantilize young and old adults in
ways about gender and also I just want -- actually I may not be answering your question,
but also to note that even the way we imagine what childhood is, is also a very
privileged space, and who is allowed childhood and who is not. And how we name it,
because, particularly -- you see that a lot on school systems, about even how we respond
to in one context what we would call childless exuberance, and in that same space on a
different body, we would call it a dangerous child. And that's where that whole -- I think
that's where a lot of the papers point. So thank you for marking the notion of adultism.
I guess because we're talking about schools, children come so much in it. And I think at
the beginning of my paper I kind of like said how we moved. But, yeah.
>> ALFREDO ARTILES: I haven't thought about this, so I am glad as you raised
it. I want to think about it more. But I think it's a fascinating angle because, as you
pointed out, historically we have resorted to infantilize racial minorities and people with
disability in a number of ways. But there was some interesting work on transition now, in
high schools and middle schools and transition plans, trying to look at that through the
lens of habitus and how the work is done in those meetings and plans may be another
social project to introduce them into adulthood but in a very different way, to very
specific path is not the traditional Marxist learning to labor kind of analysis, but it's
bringing a new perspective to this thing that we have never questioned before. So I
think there's a huge possibility to critique this issue.
>> NIRMALA EREVELLES: And because you brought that up and that's also
the really dangerous space because there are certain adults -- especially when you talk
about transition, round of course, learning the labor part, but also in expressions of their
own self, as in their sexuality, where we use then the child model to actually disenable
them to enjoy and appreciate their own desires, and it's put under the logic of
protections. We're going to protect these adults just because they have disabilities from
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enjoying what every “adult” is supposed to have. And that I think is an even more -- is
even more violent because people just accept it as it's a human -- I'm on some human
rights boards for community groups and they were very casual thing is to do castrate or
do something just for protection, and it's like casual. So that notion of adulthood, child
becomes very predictable.
>> FRANCESCA GAIBA: Let's take two more questions.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: This question in some ways comes partly from your
talk yesterday, Nirmala, what you talked about accountability. So for the grad students,
and there are many here, I'm sure, how do you -- what recommendations do you have, I
guess, to be accountable to the historical and structural inequalities that you're talking
about here? How can we take what you all have said today into our own work and sort
of do justice, instead of just adding this oh, the and disability, and race, and class, right?
Because this is often offered as the easy solution. So I was hoping you could talk to that.
>> NIRMALA EREVELLES: It's -- I mean, it's simple and it's complicated. It's
act. I mean, I think because all our theories here, I think really locates us, it has to be
grounded in the actual conditions of people's lives. I'm a mother. I have an
eight-year-old who goes to school and I see -- I feel very passionate. That's where the
accountability comes when I go into my daughter's classroom and I see kids just like her,
as adorable as her, as smart and intelligent as her, being produced in really brutal ways,
and I can already mark trajectories of that violence with certain students. So to be
accountable is not -- like we have to -- I'm not making an argument of common sense
because common sense doesn't allow us to be complex and critical, and that's where the
relationship of theory to practice, I find so connected that we can actually -- like when I
teach my students, it's always easier because I also live in Alabama, it's a nice place
because we supposedly represent, right, all of America's failures on race is put in my
statement, you know for sure it's going into yours, and I'm not just -- I don't just defend it
for our football team, I also defend our politics. So in that sense we actually see that we
are not -- we are in so many ways not a part from. We see these things happening but
we keep ourselves remote because we make our arguments, we're talking about things in
very particular compartmentalized ways. That's why my simple answer is see, analyze,
and act, maybe. I'm sure you all can say stuff, too.
>> FRANCESCA GAIBA: Any other questions? Well, please join me in
thanking the speakers. (Applause.).
We also want to invite you at the next lecture in IRRPP by Silvia Puente who is
the director of the Latino Policy Forum, and she will be speaking on campus in the student
center east on March 13th. We have flyers outside for you to take. So we hope to see
you all at the next event. (Applause.)
***This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime
Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may
not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.***
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