Female Candidates and the Emotion Doublebind

Women politicians are in an awkward place when it comes to how they display emotion, and that place becomes especially acute in Presidential campaigns, where the stakes are high and everyone is being watched highly attentively for the slightest sign of a crumble, a fault, a crack in the facade. For women in politics, women attempting to run and be taken seriously, emotion needs to be carefully calculated and balanced, but not in a way so obvious that it can be identified, because this of course would mean that they would be accused of being manipulative, of trying to work sentiment in a particular direction for political gain. Male politicians are not subject to the same kind of scrutiny, because concerns about them being ‘too emotional’ for office aren’t there; while they’re expected to be fairly stoic and plain, emotionally speaking, you don’t see concerntrolling opinion editorial columns about whether they can be trusted with nuclear launch codes.

A woman who expresses emotion on the campaign trail is ‘hysterical’ and ‘overemotional.’ Much was made of scenes in which Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin cried during the last Presidential campaign, in moments of intense stress and, yes, sadness. Because elections are about winning and when you are not the one who wins, it is sad. And sometimes that expresses in the form of tears, tears you cannot control, tears which may anger and frustrate you, but there it is. Both crying episodes were taken as evidence that women are too weak for politics; they can’t even campaign without boo-hooing when they lose!

And, of course, a woman who doesn’t express emotion is too stoic. She’s cold. She’s stiff. She’s unapproachable, and can’t be a good leader because women need to be nurturing and loving and friendly and comfortable, they must set people at ease and offer hospitality, because this is their social and cultural role. No one will want to meet with the frost queen, so having a brusque, no nonsense kind of leader will of course imperil treaty agreements and foreign relations. Women politicians must not be unemotional, because this is a sign that they are robots who will not be able to lead the country, or their parties.

Show emotion and you are too fragile, untrustworthy, and incapable for the serious adult work of politics. You are manipulative, and all the other things people like to say about women when they express feelings; you can’t approach situations objectively, you can’t be trusted to make the right decisions in times of stress, you clearly aren’t capable of setting aside your feelings on complex emotional issues. Don’t show your emotions and you’re inhuman, suspect because you don’t behave in a feminine way, which means you might be too cold and unfeeling for politics, unable to bring compassion to your job.

These issues become especially fraught when a racial element is introduced. Black and Latina women are censured for being ‘emotional’ more than white women, and the same applies to these candidates, who are expected to behave in specific ways to show that they are ‘capable’ of handling the world of politics. A woman who snaps in a debate, for example, who crisply corrects a false statement, who shows a hint of irritation, is clearly irrational and far too tempestuous to be able to deal with the real world. Asian candidates, meanwhile, are suspiciously stoic if they don’t express emotions, clearly unfeeling and incapable of connecting with their constituents, based on decades of stereotypes about emotions and culture. When these issues collide in politics, the results can be ugly, because of course people are eager to ascribe their feelings about candidates to things other than sexism and racism.

These are things to watch for in the coming months, over the course of the election, to look at how people discuss emotions in connection with female candidates, and to examine your own responses to emotional displays, or lack thereof. We are all steeped in a culture that maintains very specific beliefs about women, and we often unwittingly reinforce these beliefs in our response to situations. Or in our failure to respond when someone is talking about those beliefs as though they are generally socially accepted and understood. It is easy to slip into a place of comfort with these beliefs.

Many people still think women don’t belong in politics at all, the result of attitudes about appropriate gender roles and careers. Emotionality plays a big role in how people think about women in politics; people believe that men are less emotional, that they are more capable of controlling their emotions, that they can set their emotions aside in times of stress to focus on meeting specific challenges. By contrast, people believe that women are more emotional and less in control, and repeat falsities about hormone cycles and how no one wants to trust a politician who becomes an emotional mess every 28 days.

These attitudes may not always express blatantly and obviously, in the form of statements that women are too emotional for politics, but they come up nonetheless. They come up when people question whether a mother with young children is ready for the job, when people ask how female politicians will handle stress, when people watch candidates for any signs of what they consider to be emotional weakness, and say that impartiality is key for people in positions of power and responsibility. Implied in these is the idea that politics are altogether too much for women, who are clearly too fragile to handle the simultaneous responsibilities of being female and having careers.

31 January, 2012 – 10:17 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics | Tagged , |

Mentally Ill People Accused of Crimes Don’t ‘Get Off’ or ‘Walk Free’

One of the most pervasive and irritating myths about mental illness and crime is that when a mentally ill person is accused of a crime, there are no consequences. It comes up in cases where people are clearly mentally ill and the general view of the public is that the accused has ‘gotten away with’ something, and in cases where people introduce an altered mental state or mental illness as a mitigating circumstance and the public judge and jury, again, suggest that the accused is attempting to weasel out of punishment. The very idea of an ‘insanity defense’ is considered the cheap way out, the easy way of escaping any responsibility for committing a horrible crime; even in a place where people are innocent until proven guilty, the general perception seems to be that mentally ill people are always guilty of the crimes they are accused of, and, to boot, aren’t punished for it.

The actual facts of the matter are, of course, much more complicated. If someone is accused of a crime and taken into custody and appears to have signs of mental illness, a psychiatric evaluation may be requested. People can also ask for an evaluation independently, or their lawyers can order one. In this evaluation, the legal system determines whether the accused is fit to stand trial. If the accused is not, this doesn’t mean the doors of the jail are swung open and the accused merrily walks free.

In fact, one of two things happen. The first is that the system works to make the accused fit to stand trial with the use of forcible medications and other treatments, goal being to have someone to prop up in the dock so the performance of a trial can take place. Alternatively, the accused may be confined indefinitely in an institution. No trial, no chance at due process, just stuck in an institution and dubbed a danger to society; can’t be taken to trial, but can’t be let free either.

Cases where people do go to trial may end with the decision that the mental illness was a mitigating factor and should be considered in sentencing, but people still do time. Sometimes in psychiatric institutions, sometimes not. Their terms of parole may also include mandatory medications and counseling; in some cases, a court order can compel someone to take medication for life or face being put in an institution again. This is ‘getting off scot free,’ according to people who think they know what they’re talking about when it comes to mentally ill people accused of committing crimes.

There’s also much talk of how institutions or psych wards at prisons are cushy, and prisoners are basically rewarded for committing heinous crimes while mentally ill. ‘Where is the justice,’ people ask, when someone who commits a crime is remanded into care. This language betrays both a deep lack of understanding about how the justice system actually works on a mechanical level, and a deep hatred of mentally ill people. A belief that people with mental illness should be punished goes deeper than believing they should be treated like other people moving through the prison system; there is often an added element of wanting the accused to die, to be unable to access any kind of treatment, to be left without any hope of redemption.

Mentally ill people who commit horrible crimes live with those crimes for the rest of their lives, just like people who are not mentally ill do. They have to face the consequences of those crimes at night in their dreams and in the day when they are reminded of them. Those who do access treatment that fits their needs, therapy that benefits them, may start to process the aftermath of those crimes, may want to attempt to make amends, to find a way to atone for what they did. They experience feelings of guilt and remorse too, even if those aren’t always evident and aren’t always performed in the way the general public wants them to be.

The idea that mentally ill people ‘get off’ in the criminal justice system is based, of course, on a retributive model of justice, an eye for an eye approach where crime should be met with imprisonment and torment. People claim that it’s ‘unfair’ to see prisoners being provided with things like health care, and this is for some reason particularly galling when it’s mentally ill prisoners. They’d rather see people who are incompetent to stand trial, who may not understand the proceedings, the severity of the crime, or the situation, forced to sit in a dock and be ‘accountable,’ because retribution, getting even, is so important to them.

Justice founded on a retributive model is inherently flawed for a slew of reasons, and it becomes especially apparent when crimes involve mentally ill suspects. A rehabilitation-based model provides room for people to grow, to change, to get treatment, to develop as human beings, to reshape their world and make changes in their lives. This model, though, is one many people find alien and upsetting, wrong, because it means ‘going free.’ Their focus on punishment ignores the cost of crime to the accused. People who commit crimes do live with the consequences, do face the reality of their experiences, every day, and not always in socially approved ways.

Tormenting people with forced treatment and confinement and isolation is no form of justice. It’s just another form of crime, and it certainly doesn’t mean that people are getting off free and escaping the consequences of their crimes. Lengthy time in institutions is a high price to pay, as is the lifetime of restrictions placed on mentally ill people accused of committing crimes.

30 January, 2012 – 10:38 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , , |

Raunch: Romance or Literary Fiction? Depends on the Protagonist

Raunch has a well-established and beloved place in the world of fiction, and it’s an ancient history, too. The Greeks produced their fair share of it, Shakespeare added to it, and authors today continue the trend in literature and other forms of pop culture. Humans have a deep love for raunch, and that need is happily fed by people who love writing and creating it. It’s notable that many of the most lingering legacies in terms of works of art and fiction are, well, rather raunchy. Even some segments of the Bible are pretty graphic.

There’s also a huge divide, though, when it comes to reception of raunch in fiction. If it’s written by a man and features a male protagonist, it’s usually classified as literary fiction. It receives an artful cover and arch reviews, and makes it on to the New York Times bestseller list. It’s heralded as bold, remarkable, and daring. A tour-de-force. The kind of work readers have been waiting for; this is high raunch, high culture, this is something bigger than the sum of its parts, this is a gift to the world from the author because it speaks to the universal human condition.

When it’s written by women, though, and features female protagonists, suddenly it is chick lit or romance, depending on the specifics of the storyline. The same kinds of narratives, like a character who decides to leave a dull office job and is whirled along on a series of adventures which include a variety of bizarre and graphic scenes, and lots and lots of sex, of course, are treated very differently along gendered lines. Raunch with women is considered for female audiences, something of interest to female readers, it is about girls, it is intended to be titillating for the women who read it. It is not for society at large.

This idea, that things about men are for society and things about women are for women, can be seen in so many aspects of pop culture, but it’s very irksome with raunch and sexuality in particular, because of the implications that go along with it. For men, sexuality is considered a sort of birthright; obviously men would go on sexual adventures as part of their coming of age, as part of a catalytic event in their lives, their sexuality would be taken for granted as part of the experience. Obviously this is an important part of the male experience, and it’s implied that this is the universal human experience.

Men read such books to see themselves but women should read them to understand men and all the things they live with, the logic goes, and for the purposes of the people making these divides, the rest of us don’t exist. Raunch for women, though, well, it’s a bit dirty. It’s not the universal human experience because it’s only for naughty girls, and thus while women can read it, perhaps to be titillated by a view of a life they will not live, there’s nothing of interest in there for men. No one wants to explore female sexuality, let alone encounter sexually aggressive, bold, daring female characters, or women who do raunchy things as part of an expedition to learn more about themselves and develop more fully as people and as characters.

This defaulting of male experiences as the universal human condition and female ones as ‘for women’ is dehumanising and belittling. There’s no reason that books should be called literary fiction when they’re about dudes, and romance or chick lit when the story is virtually the same, but it’s about women. Why should books featuring bonds between male characters, focusing on male friendships, be literary fiction, while books about women’s lives and friendships are considered saccharine wastes of time for all but female readers and thus subject to exile in the chick lit section of the shelves?

There is something deeper in this resistance to the idea that female raunch is for women only, and it revolves around the idea that women don’t have a sexuality of their own, but are instead pulled by the men around them. As participants in male-centric raunch, women may appear to enjoy themselves, they may even initiate some acts, but they are subordinate to the main character. Women who are sexually aggressive in such books are often pit stops on the way to true love. They are the dirty girls the male protagonist plays with to learn about sexuality and the world and then they are discarded when they are no longer useful because it’s time to move to the nice girl, the real woman of the piece.

Male raunch lands om bestseller lists and wins critical acclaim because it’s a ‘statement piece,’ and people talk about how daring the author is to write such explicit, in your face scenes, to create a book with violence and sexuality and tangled storylines and messiness. The same sorts of literary accomplishments by women are ignored, thrust to the back of the shelf. They are certainly not singled out for consideration for literary awards, or critically discussed in prestigious publications that can make or break awards nominations. They are quietly shunted to the back of the room because they’re for women—they’re about women, so they are for women, because obviously no one other than women has an interest in women’s lives and sexuality—and releasing them on the general public might have devastating consequences for social stability. Imagine a world where sexually aggressive women on voyages of self discovery get the same kind of critical acclaim that men in the same position do.

29 January, 2012 – 10:24 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender | Tagged , , , , |

Organising: My Mind’s Oasis of Calm

My brain is constantly on the go. It doesn’t really know how to turn off. If I’m weeding the garden, it’s spinning in a dozen different directions, thinking about projects I want to work on and things I read in the news and what to make for dinner and how to plan out the latest arrangement of the living room and whether Loki has enough food to get through the rest of the week or if I should go to town. When I get ready for bed at night, I lie awake flooded with ideas that woosh around in my head, and I let them churn about for a while, slowly, gradually spinning down until I can follow one thread into sleep, because I’ve learned from past experience that attempting to force my brain into quiescence doesn’t work at all. I just have to go with the flow.

Sometimes the buzzing and demands for attention and thoughts become too overwhelming and I feel like I’m going to explode with all the things happening inside my brain. This is the point where I bring out the, so to speak, big guns, the most effective and delicious way of calming my brain: cleaning and organising. There’s something about organising that allows me to concentrate just on what I am doing. For me, it’s a form of meditation, because it brings my brain back to center, back to an even keel, back to a place where I feel like I am in control again, instead of being driven madcap all over the landscape by whatever is whirling around in my mind.

I’ll spend a whole day organising, if I can get away with it. Most people wouldn’t notice an appreciable change if they looked at the before and after, but I can see the difference. The bookshelves carefully taken apart and wiped down, books replaced with precisely the right spacing between each other and from the front of the shelves. Spices realphabetised and faced out again, pantry carefully arranged, rug reoriented just so, storage loft neatly brought back into order again.

I can feel the edges of my brain calming as I bring things back into order, even though people might think they were already orderly to begin with. In a way, my house is like my brain; on the surface, it appears very neatly organised with a precise place for everything, but over time, things are ever so slightly shifted, things are not quite right, and I get increasingly unsettled and restless until I throw everything out onto the middle of the floor and start all over again, carefully replacing things just so and getting rid of bits I don’t need and making sure everything is arranged before I like it, so the slow slide off center can start all over again.

It took me years to understand that other people didn’t operate like this, that my need to rearrange furniture and go on a cleaning and tidying spree every three months or so was viewed as deeply strange by many of the people around me, who were happy to settle into dust and things slightly out of order, who didn’t mind when the living room chair shifted six inches to the right or the table developed a few rings from mistakenly placed hot drinks. I think that for me this was the first inkling that there was something about my brain that was different, that for me cleaning and organising created a calming oasis where I felt balanced and in control, and I would get terribly upset when people interrupted it or failed to understand the importance.

Growing up, you start to learn that the people around you are different and it can be jarring and upsetting as you see that your normal is not their normal; that cleaning the grout in the shower with a toothbrush is peculiar, by many people’s estimations, that other people don’t find it soothing to contemplatively and carefully scrub the sink to remove all traces of staining and leave it smooth and polished again, that no everyone mops the floors by hand with a sponge and a frequently-changed bucket of water to be sure to get all the dirt. Not everyone has items so carefully arranged in the house that a move of only a few centimetres is instantly detectable, a sign that something is wrong and someone has been there and something is off centre.

And not everyone has a brain that goes, all the time, this was the hardest lesson of all for me to learn as a child, and later, growing up, when people wanted to do things like send me on vacation and I didn’t know what to do. What could I do on a sand beach? I could count the trees and classify the rocks, or swim and think about projects, or I could organise the dishes in the rental house and scrub the grill and meticulously sweep the porch to make sure not a single leaf stays on it for more than an hour, but this thing, relaxing, in the form many people think of it, is alien to me. For me the best vacation is one where I get to clean and organise and whirl around with delight as my brain settles down.

Relaxing is throwing myself into an epic cleaning and organising project, completly redoing how I arrange my furniture or deciding to organise my trousers differently or putting together a spice chest or deciding how I want to arrange my storage jars in the kitchen, or changing the order of my library to make my reference books more logical. This is cleansing. This is calming. This is happiness, for me.

28 January, 2012 – 10:10 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , , |

Gold Definitely Doesn’t Glitter: Mining, Human Rights Abuses, and Dirty Metals

A mythology surrounds gold, a precious metal that has become so woven into our social fabric that it is almost impossible to escape. Gold medals mean winning, gold is a preferred metal for jewelry, the gold standard is promoted for currency. Gold is a glittering object, something everyone wants more of, gold is bought and sold in vast quantities on global markets, gold is so delicate and malleable, so soft, yet so ideal for making electrical contacts. ‘All that glitters is not gold,’ as the saying goes, a reminder that some things that look shiny aren’t valuable, but does gold itself glitter? What does it mean to glitter?

Precious metals mining is an extremely messy business, especially on the large scale needed for commercial production of metals, and gold is no exception. It requires digging a deep pit, processing tons of material with harsh chemicals to extract the smallest usable components of metal, and dumping the remainders, the tailings, somewhere out of the way so the mining can continue. As the gold moves down the processing chain it is subjected to more chemicals, to heating and other processes, until it ends up pressed into a bar in a bank vault or on the finger of a socialite preparing to get married.

The wake left behind can be brutal. Gold guts indigenous communities, who may be displaced by mines or by their toxic runoff. Tailings ponds overflow and spew harsh chemicals into the environment, destroying farmland and ruining habitat. Workers at gold mines receive a pittance for their labour and work in unsafe conditions, with few protections from the dangers all around them. The volume of waste involved to make gold is staggering, and it continues because it is profitable, because gold is sought after, because of its high social status, because as long as mining companies can make money, they will continue to do so by any means possible.

Some of the world’s largest mining companies are based in the United States, and they are careful to ship their human rights violations overseas to mines outside the reach of enforcement officials in the US, and far from the eyes of consumers. People buying gold may be aware on some level that it, like other precious metals, can be accompanied by some environmental degradation and worker exploitation, but they don’t see it, aren’t confronted with it, and can turn away from it if they don’t want to deal with it. And many don’t, because the face of oppression is difficult to look at when it’s standing in the way of something you want.

There are alternatives not just to gold, but to dirty gold specifically. Campaigns to improve working conditions to protect workers as well as the environment have promoted more sustainable mining activities, and more functional environments for handling and processing gold. The end result tends to be more expensive, but the costs pay for themselves in some cases if companies are able to advertise their products as clean. Developing a certification and labeling system would improve matters even further by creating an endorsed seal to indicate the origins of gold, although such programmes are not without problems; a seal is only as good as the monitoring chain associated with it, the standards, the people who work to support it. Seals testifying that gold is from clean sources can easily become a tool for abuse in the wrong hands.

Gold can also be recycled, especially for jewelry. Jewelers working with used gold can produce more clean and ethical pieces for their clients, and may also work with other precious metals that have been handled responsibly. The same commitment to clean gold can also be accompanied by cleaner processes at the workbench, the use of tools like lead-free solder to keep production clean, and protect the jeweler’s health in addition to the environment. Consumers have to be aware of the benefits of recycling metals, though, have to understand why they may be a better buy, and this can be a difficult topic to educate people on, because of perceptions about recycling and reusing.

To see a true shift in the gold industry, consumers have to be willing to commit to demanding better standards, and companies that work with gold need to be subjected to more social pressure. That includes not just mines but other companies in the supply chain that process and move gold, as well as financial institutions that work with gold. Those same gold traders exchanging certificates worth billions of dollars, spiking a worldwide trade in gold, especially right now, as economic uncertainty makes people nervous about investments and leads people to sink money into gold, could be a powerful force for change on the market, if they were willing to be. Banks refusing to do business with mines known to have a history of human rights violations, for instance, could radically change the shape of the industry. Sourcing metals ethically should be key to any sort of environmental corporate responsibility plan, but it often isn’t, because consumers aren’t applying pressure.

Gold can glitter, if it’s mined and handled fairly and justly, by people who work in safe conditions and are paid well, in communities where the interest of the community, rather than the value of the underlying rock, is the most important concern. These conditions are few and far between in the gold industry, which largely isn’t held accountable for its actions, and thus has no significant reason to change; individual retailers are slowly caving to carefully-exerted public pressure, but the campaign against environmentally unsound precious metals needs to bigger. It is time to start forcing the huge movers and shakers to take responsibility for what they sell and how they sell it.

27 January, 2012 – 10:53 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues | Tagged , , |

Tools: Not Just For Boys!

I am a huge fan of tools. I don’t have a very large collection of tools because I don’t really do that many projects that require them, but I have a fair number, and I absolutely adore opportunities to work with tools. I like building things and coming up with solutions to interesting spatial problems and crafting objects. I love that feeling when you discover the perfect tool for a job and cackle with glee as it slips naturally into place and does exactly what you need it to. Sometimes, I wander through the hardware store just to look at tools, even though I don’t need to buy any and can’t think of a specific use for whatever the current object of my lust is.

Yet, none of the people in tool advertisements look like me.

Actually, let me restate that: None of the people in tool advertisements who are actually using tools look like me. For some reason, my Hulu ads have been serving up a lot of tool ads lately, so this is kind of on my mind. Over December, of course, the thrust of the messaging was that viewers should buying tools for the men in their lives at Christmas. I saw a whole series of ads featuring delighted men lifting interesting tools out of lovely packages while their adoring female partners looked on. The implication, of course, was that tools make the perfect holiday gift for men, and that men will be so excited and grateful when women think of them with the gift of tools.

Naturally, none of these ads showed a single woman getting tools for Christmas. Women don’t use tools, silly! And, of course, no one of any other gender was featured; I think we’re a long way away from a national ad campaign featuring anyone of nonbinary gender, and tools are an example of a particularly gendered product. It’s assumed that only men want, need, and use them, so images of people receiving and using tools inevitably depict men. Tool ads will start ramping up again in advance of father’s day, another reminder than men are users of tools, and women should buy them for them; if you’re a daughter, you should get your dad a nice set of tools to show him how much you love him.

I see it in pop culture well beyond advertising; men are the ones fixing homes and installing DIY bathroom appliances, men are the ones building things with sons, men are the ones using tools, modeling how to use them, making things. Women are the passive consumers of built objects or the ones who poke their heads into the garage and ask if anyone wants sandwiches. You don’t even see girls working with tools. Books on home repair and construction specifically aimed at women are…fluffy and chipper, like this is the only way for this information to penetrate delicate ladybrains. ‘Neutral’ construction manuals are really designed for men, not people of any gender, as is implied in the images and discussion. Once again, the default, the generic, the all-purpose reference, is actually a highly gendered one, because, obviously, only men use tools.

It’s irritating to be regularly reminded that I am apparently not a person who uses tools, and for people who know me to be told, through advertising messaging, that tools are a gift I would not enjoy receiving. I look at the men and women in my life and see a pretty even split when it comes to who maintains and adores a tool collection and who does not; some of my women friends are electricians, for example, with a whole van full of delicious tools, while some of the men I know are lucky if they can root out a screwdriver somewhere in the back of a drawer in an emergency. They definitely don’t have hammers.

Yet, pop culture tells us that it is men who are the tool users and makers of things. Boys take shop and girls take home ec, and this sharp gender divide is particularly stark when boys and girls try to swap; a girl who attempts to get into auto shop gets suspicious glances, and so does a boy who says he’d rather take home economics. Men build things, women cook food and clean floors, you know. The maintenance of this divide through constant pop culture messaging is yet another example of the way the world is attempting to shore up artificial gender divides, to fend off instability; advertisements telling people to buy tools for men are like the finger in the dike, the thing that will keep gender from exploding and getting all messy everywhere.

Just once, I’d like to see a tool advertisement featuring a woman in exactly the same role as a man. Excitedly opening a package wrapped in neutral paper to uncover a nifty looking tool that isn’t pink or sparkly, but comes in your default sober, basic colors, and being excited. Turning to thank the person next to her; maybe that person is a son or daughter, or a romantic partner. That woman is happy because someone gave her some tools, and she wants the whole world to know it—you can buy tools for ladies and the world won’t explode.

Maybe if we can reach that point, a point where advertisements show women driving sportscars and buying tools and owning golf clubs, maybe then we can shove the door all the way open and let nonbinary people get their fare share of consumerist delights. After all, we like it when people buy us presents too.

26 January, 2012 – 10:39 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender | Tagged , |

A Civil Crime: Disability Discrimination In the Workplace

Acts of legislation in the United States like the Americans With Disabilities Act frame disability as a civil crime; if you discriminate against a person with disabilities who is protected under the law, that person can take you to court to sue you for compensation. Likewise, the Department of Justice can choose to take action, particularly in cases involving multiple instances of systemic discrimination. This means, of course, that many people cannot afford to use the legal system to challenge discrimination, because you need to pay for legal representation in civil cases, and this is not an option for everyone. It’s also a particular problem with discrimination in the workplace, which can be insidious and hard to fight.

People with disabilities seeking employment can be discriminated against from the start in terms of employment decisions that mysteriously pass over all the disabled candidates. There will always be a perfectly reasonable explanation; someone with better qualifications, an employee who seemed like a better fit with the ethics of the company, something. Anything. Proving discrimination in these cases can be extremely difficult, especially for someone who may be searching for a job and doesn’t have time to deal with a suit, and also doesn’t want to be known as a ‘lawsuit-happy’ employment candidate; being involved in a civil case can make you unappealing to prospective employers who fear you will do the same to them.

Once actually in the workplace, discrimination can take a myriad of forms for disabled employees, and again, it’s hard to fight. It’s difficult to put your finger on it, to pin it down and say ‘this specifically is happening.’ Disabled employees are entitled to accommodations, but this requires asking for them, negotiating for them, working with staff to get them. In some workplaces, this is easier than others. Some are designed to be disability friendly and want to work with staff. Others are resistant, and find ways of making the workplace casually hostile.

Which means that disabled employees facing discrimination have tough decisions to make. They can keep going through the system, working on getting accommodations and talking with personnel about how to get them. Or they can consider a suit, in which case they need to ask if they have enough material to prove discrimination, can afford an attorney, can prove the case in court. Since there’s a myth that disabled people simply like to sue willy nilly, juries often look unfavorably on civil rights cases involving disability discrimination, which means the bar can be high for successfully proving a case.

A ready and clear instance of discrimination might not look like it to a jury, especially after the business owner gets on the stand and testifies about how difficult and unreasonable the requested accommodation was. The jury thinks, well, the disabled person was asking for something out of line, and it’s a pity, but that’s the way it is. The plaintiff shouldn’t have been working in that job at all, or the respondent was right to fire the plaintiff, who obviously didn’t fit in.

Disabled employees have few protections in the workplace, and this has huge consequences for them. In cases where it might be possible to file a suit and address an issue, there will always be lingering doubts; going to court might not be the best move, politically, for the individual, even if the case would be a slam dunk and has the support and endorsement of an attorney used to handling such cases. It might be more important to be known in the industry as someone easygoing and accommodating than to get a reputation as the kind of person who sues people.

At the end of the line, keeping your job, even if the working conditions aren’t very functional, could be more important than anything else. Especially when that job comes with benefits and protections, like health care to cover disability-related expenses that would be impossible to bear independently. Some disabled employees walk a fragile line, because they can’t afford health services on their own, and must either work to get benefits or earn enough to pay for them independently, or end up unemployed and able to access government assistance, which still won’t meet their needs. The fragility of existence for some workers can mean that the best option is to say nothing in the face of discrimination, to grit your teeth and bear it, because you need to survive.

Which, of course, means that employers get away with maintaining inaccessible workplaces, and don’t learn about how to make accommodations and deal with disabled employees. This is not the fault of people who don’t or can’t speak up about disability access needs, it’s the fault of a world where accessibility is deemed the responsibility of the individual, rather than the employer. Employers should have frameworks in place for handling accommodations requests and making sure disabled staff feel comfortable and welcome. They should hire consultants to discuss how to make their spaces more friendly. They should be ready to provide accessibility services to people with a range of disabilities, but they aren’t, and no one holds them accountable for this.

Because it’s a civil crime, which means that the victims of the violation are the ones tasked with enforcing it. And unless a case is large or complex, organisations that promote civil rights can’t take it on, because they need to use their resources as efficiently as possible. Fighting for one worker who needs an extra break to maintain good blood sugar levels isn’t worth it on the grand scale, doesn’t make enough of a difference for the community as a whole, so that employee is left out in the cold by framing accessibility as a personal responsibility, right down to the legal handling of accommodations requests and discrimination.

25 January, 2012 – 10:57 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , , |

Public Employees are Not the Enemy

The deepening of economic woes inevitably contributes to an increase in social and political faultlines. This increase is particularly marked when it comes to workers; union are pitted against nonunion, for example, and public employees are pitted against private personnel. It creates a crab in a pot world for workers struggling for fair rights and safe working conditions, where success for one group of workers is viewed as grounds to try to pull them back down into the milling fray again, rather than allowing them to escape the pot, perhaps lead the way out of the pot, create a world where no one at all is scrabbling around in a pot for scraps.

Particular tensions seem to surround public workers, many of whom also belong to unions. There’s a reason public employees tend to join unions, and why government agencies are often union workplaces; it was a hard-fought battle. These unions protect the rights of public employees, because they are first on the line when it comes to budget cuts. They work in environments where potential abuses of workers are myriad; the social worker asked to take on a slightly higher caseload just to take care of things for a few months, the garbage worker forced to work over time, the ranger ordered to take on a patrol area to make up for a shortage of employees.

Public employee unions play an important role in protecting workplace safety, being aggressive about wages and benefits, and ensuring that even as people serve the government, and the rest of the population, they are not exploited. For that matter, these measures also benefit the general public by ensuring that people responsible for health and safety aren’t overworked and tired. The hard-won union deals, including things like health care and pensions, are the result of much negotiation and discussion, pressure from government agencies, attempts to weasel out of contracts and deals. Public employees have fought very hard for what they have, and continue to fight to protect it, because there are always wolves nipping at their heels.

Yet, public workers are increasingly framed as the enemy. Private employees resent their vacation time, their pensions, their access to health care. Instead of asking why these benefits are not universal, they demand to know why public workers have them. They’re changing the shape of the debate and pushing it in precisely the direction those in power want it in; instead of demanding benefits for themselves, people are attacking benefits held by some workers. They are shifting the direction of things from a world where benefits should be a default with all employment to a place where employees with benefits are attacked because clearly they shouldn’t have them.

When public workers strike to defend their benefits and raise awareness about cuts and the impact of exploitation, private sector workers scream at them. People complain, for example, about the lack of garbage pickup when municipal workers choose to strike. Call the garbage workers lazy and demand to know when their services will be returned; they don’t pressure agencies to reach a deal with the strikers, to give or restore their benefits, they insist that those bin men should get back to work already because the garbage is piling up and it’s disgusting and it’s a nuisance. Workers striking for fair pay and wages, for their employers to live up to the promises they made, are a nuisance, and should go away. These are the messages being sent by responses to public sector strikes.

Those in power love this, and they’re careful to artfully distribute propaganda to encourage it. They want people thinking of public workers as the enemy because this is how they escape closer examination and discussion. If everyone is too busy screaming about ridiculous pension packages to support public sector workers in retirement, they can’t ask why they themselves don’t have the same packages. If people are calling paid vacation for government employees wasteful and disgusting, they don’t stop to take the time and ask why it is that any vacation or sick days they are allowed are unpaid, and they get only a scant number of year before they run the risk of getting in trouble. People yelling about luxurious health care packages for public employees don’t ask they they don’t have similar packages, or better yet, why there’s not a national single payer health care system to ensure that everyone, regardless of employer, gets access to the same standard of care.

Public workers are not the enemy, any more than private employees working in unions. People working in solidarity with each other can support their movements for better working conditions and pay; joining public sector workers in strikes to support their demands, for example, lays the groundwork for support in the future to demand better wages for private employees who don’t have the protection of the union. Showing people in power that workers aren’t going to tear each other down in response to propaganda any more, but instead are going to join hands, form a chain, and pull everyone out of the pot together, sends a clear and inescapable message.

Is it a message workers are ready to send? Increased strike activity and discussion about working conditions and wages seems to indicate that some people are interested in connecting the dots and shaping a new world for workers and employment actions. It remains to be seen whether people can overcome the propaganda they’re fed about public workers to stand in solidarity with them instead of targeting them with their rage; we can be unstoppable if we work together, or we can collapse into an easily-picked off pile that allows the wealthy to maintain their money and power while the rest of us scrabble for crumbs.

24 January, 2012 – 10:42 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , , |

Laying Some History On You: Nisei Troops

The internment of people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during the Second World War was a particularly dark era in the nation’s history. Decades of racism and scaremongering about the ‘yellow peril’ laid the groundwork for the executive order condemning Japanese families to camps for the duration of the war; some people moved through multiple camps, series of transfers, lost almost everything they owned, and were subject to racism from the communities where their camps were located, to boot. Despite being told that simply being of Japanese ancestry made them a security threat so huge that they needed to be confined in camps, some residents of the camps wanted to fight in the war, thought of themselves as Americans, and were eager to play a role as well.

Shifting staffing needs eventually led the government to allow second-generation Japanese-Americans, the nisei, to serve. They were forced to agree to a loyalty oath before they could take up arms, of course, unlike all other soldiers, and they served in segregated units headed by white officers. They also weren’t allowed to serve in the Pacific theatre; evidently even after signing loyalty oaths and indicating a willingness to fight and being ready to die for the country that had penned them up like stock waiting for slaughter, they were still considered suspect, and couldn’t be allowed too close to regions where Japanese troops might be present.

Nisei units went on to conduct themselves with distinction, participating in a number of key military events. They were there for the liberation of concentration camps, for beating back German troops from important landmarks. They fought, ferociously, even as their friends and family members were incarcerated in internment camps in the United States. Even as they were segregated from other US soldiers, in a military where being ‘American’ supposedly wasn’t a matter of race, but mixed race units couldn’t be allowed. Hundreds died or went missing in combat as they fought for a nation that wouldn’t even grant them equal rights.

Some members of nisei units received recognitions after the war, but it took decades for them to fully recognised for their contributions to the war. Anti-Japanese sentiment lingered long after the end of the Second World War and wasn’t helped by conflict in Korea and Vietnam, which stressed the idea that people of Asian descent were suspect, the enemy, even if they weren’t of the same ethnic heritage as the people appearing on the television screen every night. For families rebuilding after the war, attempting to recapture what they had before the camps took it from them, getting military awards might not have been on the top of the priority list, but they certainly would have made a difference; being decorated with honours would have been a reminder to the community at large that nisei troops did something important for the country, and weren’t the enemy.

Belated recognitions came decades over, in some cases; as recently as last year, Congress was issuing proclamations to upgrade decorations and commemorate the service of nisei troops in Europe. Members of these units also participated in military intelligence, where they were critical players as translators of information that would have been difficult to access by other means. The role of nisei intelligence agents is even less well known and discussed than that of the heroic segregated troops who participated in the liberation of Europe alongside allied forces from other regions.

It is telling that even now, the nisei troops are not discussed as widely as other units and groups in the Second World War. They played an important role, both proving themselves as troops and quietly saying something to the world with their service. Yet, historians of the era don’t spend a lot of time talking about them, discussing the barriers they overcame to serve and be recognised. Along with segregated Black troops, they are a critical part of the war’s history, and a part that often slides through the cracks. In war movies, for example, it seems like most faces are white, and the narrative is about the white soldiers who fought; it’s a narrative of liberation and freedom that doesn’t delve very deeply into the uglier sides of the US military in the Second World War.

Segregation existed in the war, and played a role in how and where troops were deployed, where they fought, what kinds of services they accessed, and how they were treated at the end of the war, when the guns went silent and the recovery began. Segregation is part of US military history, as are the mechanisms that eventually broke it down and allowed people to enlist on a more equal racial footing, even was the racial representation of the military is not proportional to the rest of the country, and even as the distribution of officers in particular doesn’t line up with the expected distribution given the population.

Failing to talk about the role of the nisei troops in the Second World War ignores their social, cultural, and political meaning. And erases a very important part of Asian-American history, where people who were confined in camps because they were considered dangerous simply because of their race were willing to go to war anyway, under the flag of the nation that was taking everything from them and violating their civil rights, and were willing to do so with valour, despite the fact that they served in segregated units and were deployed selectively to ‘reduce security risks.’

23 January, 2012 – 10:20 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in race | Tagged , , , |

Network Fears Lead to Diluted Television

The 2011-2012 television season has been generally lacklustre, a source of particular disappointment for me at this time of year when it’s dark and cold and I really want to be able to sink my teeth into some seriously juicy narratives. With the exception of Revenge, which I have been loving and discussing with friends, there aren’t any new shows that I am wildly enthusiastic about; I like Grimm, but I’m getting wary of it, for example. Many of the new shows have a kind of watered down feeling, like someone came to the network with a strong proposal and somewhere between proposal and execution, it got dialed back a bit to make it more palatable for television audiences.

Fear has become a major motivator for the networks. They’re struggling with a new economy where less money is available, and they need more sure hits in order to be sure to keep advertisers, to attract viewers, to retain their hold. They’re also struggling with a new world in terms of distribution. People don’t huddle up in front of the television at the appointed hour anymore. They use DVRs, or Hulu, or a network website for online streaming. Or they use torrents to access the television they want, when they want it, a particular issue internationally; Downton Abbey started airing in the UK months before it did in the US, but US viewers didn’t want to wait. As networks try to adapt, fear becomes a larger and larger thing on the playing field, a driving need to keep pace.

Copycatting seemed to be the order of the day on a lot of networks this season, as they looked to prior successes and tried to make their own versions, but these versions were more restrained, less expansive, and ultimately, much less bold. They failed, or teetered on the edge, precisely because the networks weren’t willing to go out on a limb and viewers sensed it. If the network didn’t want to commit to being aggressive and innovative, viewers didn’t want to commit to following the show; why bother, when there are other offerings that meet those needs.

On ABC, Pan Am attempted to capture some of the 1960s nostalgia brought about by Mad Men, and failed pretty spectacularly. The two shows are like night and day. Mad Men is aggressive, dark, bold. It’s got sharp visual design and a very specific aesthetic and it has complex emotional and political storylines, with characters who are, for the most part, deeply flawed even as they struggle to make their way in the world. It’s a show about a new era, and captures that new era with a bold, bright brush. One thing it definitely doesn’t do, for the most part, is make the 1960s seem like a great, happy, troublefree time to live. It reminds viewers that this was a time of change, and that many of those changes were not good.

Pan Am, on the other hand, seems to be going for a more happy go lucky vision of the 1960s. It’s gone for the romance of flying the friendly skies with one of the most famous airlines of the era, suiting up lovely ladies in classic uniforms and sending them off to exotic locations. Oh, it tries to hint at some social and political issues, like having them see Kennedy in Berlin and assigning one of the actresses a role as a spy, but it is much lighter in tone. It’s meant to be fun and fluffy, and it is, but people watching Mad Men aren’t there for fun and fluff, they are there for darkness and brooding. Which means that they aren’t overly drawn to Pan Am, because it’s just not their kind of show; it’s a watered down shadow of the show they’re watching, an attempt at a clone that falls well, well short.

About the only thing the two shows have in common, other than being set in the 1960s, is a failure to address the racial politics of the era in a meaningful way. We get hints and glimmer in both cases, but rarely do they confront race head on. A few interracial relationships, say, an occasional nod to the civil rights movement. It’s telling that there’s not a single Black stewardess on Pan Am, despite the fact that there would have been; that airlines were in fact one of the places where the battles of the civil rights movement were fought, and the 1960s marked an era of forced desegregation on a number of major air carriers. Pan Am is prettiness and fluff and a white-focused view of the world, just like Mad Men, a place where the real story is in what is happening to the white people, not to the larger world around them.

Mad Men was a smashing success because it was willing to take people to dark, angry, bitter places. Many of the characters are unlikeable and sometimes actively gross and unpleasant. It’s not a happy show, even though there are happy moments, and it’s a commentary both on the 1960s, and the nostalgia that surrounds it, and the kind of hero-worship of the 1960s, and on the modern era. How much has changed in the world since the battles fought in Mad Men? How many secretaries and administrative assistants find themselves in positions much like Joan as they struggle to navigate the workplace? People come for this, not the pretty clothes and the cocktails, and this is something ABC seemed to miss with Pan Am, thinking that glitter and fluff could replace critical content.

Continuing to water down storylines is not going to work for the networks. Eventually they’re going to need to break through their shell and get bold again, because bold television makes waves. It also flops egregiously sometimes, but that’s the risk you have to take; if you want a success, and a show that will become a hit, something people will talk about for years, you have to be daring.

22 January, 2012 – 10:02 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in television |