An Urgent Pause: Facing the Intertwined Constitution of Race and Disability

There is no raw, untrained perception dwelling in the body. The human sensorium has had to be educated to the appreciation of racial difference. When it comes to the visualization of discrete racial groups, a great deal of fine-tuning has been required. (Gilroy, 2000: 42) The history of racism is a narrative in which the congruency of micro- and macrocosm has been disrupted at the point of their analogical intersection: the human body. It knits together science and superstition. (Gilroy, 2000: 53) I am suggesting that the only appropriate response … is to demand liberation not from white supremacy alone, however urgently that is required, but from all racializing and raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about thinking. (Gilroy, 2000: 40) These quotations guide some of the methodological moves we are making today in our interpretive version of disability studies (DS) that is wide awake to issues of race and in touch with Black studies. We do this work from Tkaronto (Toronto), sacred land comprised of and cared for by the people of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca and the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, and the Haudenosaunee. We conduct our scholarship in hopes of unsettling some of the stories that have degraded the land and its peoples. Given there is no easy fix for human degradation, especially the sort that is born from visualizing discrete groups of lesser people, we assume that it is perception itself that needs to be investigated. Put differently, the perception of people and social issues are organized by the culture within which the perceiver of these problems is located – requiring us, as I have suggested elsewhere, to read our readings, watch our watchings (Titchkosky, Reading And Writing Disability Differently (Free Download), p9). Or, better, following what Gilroy suggests above, our sensorium, our perceptual wherewithal of any sort, has been “educated,” even trained, through the knitting together of science and superstition, macro and microsms of culture reflecting a racializing perception alongside raciological thought. Close attention to problems as much as to solutions is required since both are caught in the fine-tuning that perceives lesser humans and social issues. However… the trickster of perception! How to perceive how we perceive?! How to attend to perception itself? Dr. Elaine (source), influenced by what DRs. Rod Michalko and Devon Healey refer to as “Blind perception,” attends to perception so as to reveal the narratives that ground the possibility of “seeing” problems. Blind perception shows how some people, in this case Police, are positioned as “See ers” of problems which makes other people appear as problems. We hope to demonstrate that a “I see,” “I feel,” “I sense” are the places where inquiry can (should?) begin to uncover how the sensorium has been educated. Our bodies being of the world as much as they are in it (Fanon, 1967 Black Skin White Masks, 232) have something to teach us about our inter-relatedness knit together by science and superstition giving rise to the sensorium / perception. Methodologically, we pause in the face of the certainty of sense. We are suggesting that pausing in the face of what already is apparent, is a pause guided by “critical hesitation” (a term developed by Alia Al-Saji, Critical Hesitation 2014). Such a hesitation is necessary in order to reveal how the complexity of social difference is made. Something happens, a problem appears, or perhaps a solution. We pause. A police encounter. Pause. A new University policy for inclusion. Pause. How do these make sense? Enacting such a critical hesitation, supports our examination of “race” and “disability” _as_ an intertwined construction making a degraded, “lesser human” appear as if natural. With these few notes on how we are working (our methodological assumptions), we will offer two reflections today showing disability as a matter of cultural production tied to a racialized education of our sensorium. Our work is driven by the especially urgent sense that scholarship needs to pause in the face of taken for granted perceptions of problems since they affect all that we do, all that we say, including the stories we tell about who is a problem and how to solve it. We only indirectly address one of the most powerful educators of all – the field of medicine, but we will have more to say about this later. [724 words] Take it away Elaine… Elaine 2144 words On April 8, 2021, Andrea “Dre” Hollingsworth was detained by Las Vegas police officers at a traffic stop. “Sit down, sit down, sit DOWN. Put your hands behind your back,” yells a police officer to Hollingsworth before shoving her onto the sidewalk. The words of the barking officer are captured by Hollingsworth who livestreams the encounter with police on her cellphone. When asked later in an interview for The Daily Moth, a Deaf news source, “Why did you decide to go live? Did you feel something would happen? Can you explain?,” Hollingsworth replied: “The funny thing is, once they drove by...They were taking sharp turns and I felt something was off.” As Gilroy says, “There is no raw, untrained perception dwelling in the body” (p. 42). What, then, to make of the perceptual training behind the utterances, “Put your hands behind your back,” and “I felt something was off”? In our brief time together today, I attend to these utterances and their pathways of arrival for some of the lessons they glean on the importance of pause in a world where — to quote Sylvia Wynter — “the hybridity of humanness–that we are simultaneously storytelling and biological beings—is thereby denied” (McKittrick & Wynter, 2015, p. 29). Guided by interpretive methods in disability studies (Titchkosky, Cagulada, DeWelles, 2022), I pause at texts, utterances, moments that have already arrived, happened, and remembered so that I might attend to a formulation of humanness that Wynter tells us is repeatedly denied — that is, our existence as storytelling and biological beings. The phrase, “put your hands behind your back,” in the video of Hollingsworth carries weight, world, and the weight of worlds. The weight can be read in the tone of the officer’s voice, a tone that is guttural and impatient. “Put your hands behind your back,” is not a request. The officer is not asking Hollingsworth, he is demanding her. These words, spat out by an officer, signal to a normative order’s stock stories, and here I’m thinking with Stuart Hall and others (1978), where multiple expressions lie in wait to be used and reused by the police in our “common stock of cultural knowledge.” Expressions such as “put your hands behind your back,” “stop right there,” “you have the right to remain silent,” roll easily from the tendrils of my imagination. The ease with which I want to objectify these phrases as the language of the police teaches me of normalcy, and my situatedness within it. The hybridity of humanness is, therefore, a hybridity mired in contradiction. Returning to Hollingsworth’s encounter with Las Vegas police officers, let me know pause at the grave contradiction of an officer yelling at a Deaf Black person to put their hands behind their back. Biology as a storyteller has trained me to understand that human hands take a particular function and appearance. I was not taught in school to perceive the voices, languages, and communities that for many, unfold in the gestures that their hands help them make — even this is only one story of sign language. “Put your hands behind your back,” then, is a story of policing told by biology, where the hands expected to go behind the back are the flesh and bone beyond the wrist and not a language and a world indirectly possessed through that language (Fanon, 2008). This story of policing is made to make sense within the framing of the “realm of the visible.” Linda Alcoff (1999) says, “…the realm of the visible, or what is taken as self-evidently visible (which is how the ideology of racism naturalizes racial designation), is recognized as the product of a specific form of perceptual practice, rather than a natural result of human sight” (p. 16). Reading the realm of the visible, calls us into, as Rod Michalko (2002) says, “watching sight” by reading sight as “socially achieved” (p. 45). Institutions therefore bear stories that are continuously repeated to structure, and obscure, the realms in which we live and the social achievement of being human. The institution of police, in particular, is dependent on the production and exploitation of categorized humans. Following rosalind hampton (2019) who says, “The construction and maintenance of racial categories and hierarchies is crucial to the interlocking power relations that sustain colonial capitalism,” the police should be understood as a colonial-capitalist institution in service of “whiteness as a racial discourse and practice” (375). The institution of police is borne, then, from stories that take for granted the process of constructing racial categories and ranking human lives as natural, making this way of seeing the human a normative perceptual practice. Influenced by Titchkosky (2007), part of my enacting pause here is reading for how my readings of the institution of police and its practices are key to instituting the domain of the visible as naturally-given rather than perceptually-provided. Tracing the production of the world as naturally-given guides us to the violence of whiteness as a racial discourse and practice and further, to the violence of a limited social imaginary. A linear narrative of human value coordinates us into objectified ways of knowing the world and into believing this knowing to be a self-evidently normal and desirable way of seeing. Following Alia Al-Saji (2019), everyday desired forms of seeing are “habitually ‘white’ forms of seeing and being” (p. 476). Norms of seeing, then, can come to be understood as also ‘white’ forms of seeing and being formed through the habitual practice of linear storytelling that consigns the human to the realm of the visible. Norms of seeing, as white forms of seeing and being, might be revealed in the oft-repeated commands that fire from a cop’s mouth. The seemingly-ordinary phrase “put your hands behind your back,” and its repeated use by police, reflects a norm of seeing that trains perception to see the ‘problem-person’ as a ‘trouble-person’ (Titchkosky, 2003). Trouble, as Michalko (1998) helps me understand, is a space to begin questioning our perceptual habits. The police see trouble in Hollingsworth, raising their voices at the trouble that they see. The scared expressions in the faces of Hollingsworth’s daughters who are also on scene, the black and white cop cars, the guns confidently displayed on officers’ waistlines — these are caught on the livestream and might be understood as part of what Hollingsworth is seeing. While these may also be what the officers see, the stock commands that they bark at Hollingsworth and her children give them away. The perceptual habits of police are clouded by white forms of seeing and being. In a realm of the visible that attempts to naturalize norms of seeing, the trouble that Hollingsworth sees is irrelevant to the police who yell “Put your hands behind your back” at her and shove her onto the ground. In a normative order, what the police see is meant to supersede all other forms of seeing. If the police see Hollingsworth as trouble, then, as the linear story goes, surely she is trouble. And yet, the weight of the worlds carried in Hollingsworth’s utterance, “I felt something was off,” disturbs the authority of what the police see as self-evident within the realm of the visible. Hollingsworth’s seeing, a seeing inflected by her worlds of deafness, blackness, queerness, and motherhood, prompts her to livestream the encounter with police officers before the police approach her vehicle. Deafness and blackness interrupt the norms of seeing that attempt to categorize her as trouble and that the police attempt to impose on her. Thinking alongside Therí Pickens’s (2019) rendering of “Black madness and mad Blackness,” I wonder about the stories of Deaf blackness and Black deafness involved in training Hollingsworth’s perception such that the sharp turns of a cop car nearby might bring her to feel that something is off. “Black madness and mad Blackness,” says Pickens (2019), “foreground the multiple and, at times, conflicting epistemological and ontological positions at stake when reading the two alongside each other” (3). Hollingsworth felt something was off before her reading of something-off came her way. Her feeling is her seeing, shaping her decision to livestream what has not yet happened so that her community might see what she is seeing and how she is being seen. In the same Daily Moth interview I reference earlier, Hollingsworth says, “The police officers give a lot of mistreatment to Black people, so I feel the same, too. And even as a Deaf person. Maybe they would assume and not want to provide an interpreter because they think I’m pretending. They already knew once my daughter said I’m Deaf, but they brushed that aside. That’s it. They looked down on me as a Black Deaf mother. Period. End of discussion.” Herein lie the multiple epistemological and ontological positions at stake, to return to Pickens, in reading Deaf blackness and Black deafness alongside each other within the realm of the visible. The dominance of a biocentric story of blackness in relation to the institution of police, as if a natural result of sight and not socially and culturally produced, train both Hollingsworth and the Las Vegas police officers to perceive danger in each other. In the realm of the visible that naturalizes the normalcy of policing difference as if self-evident, however, what the police see is made to trump what Hollingsworth sees. When deafness appears on scene alongside what the officers seem to always already see of blackness, they, to quote Hollingsworth, “brushed that aside.” Even when Hollingsworth’s daughters try to speak deafness into the space, the police do what is often singularly understood as deafness — they do not hear what Hollingsworth and her daughters have to say. Importantly, and simultaneously at stake, is the normalcy of the institution of police and policing institutions of medicine, public health, the academy, and others, whose practices rely on an order of truth and knowledge upheld by a story of humanness as solely a biological phenomenon. The realm of the visible, then, is hard at work erasing itself as crucial to the denial of what Wynter calls the “hybridity of humanness” (McKittrick & Wynter, 2015, p. 29), where we are simultaneously storytelling and biological beings. Enacting pause is imminent such that the stories and therefore the weight, world, and weight of worlds carried within utterances such as, “Put your hands behind your back,” and “I felt something was off,” might train perception anew, disturbing norms of seeing that rely upon and authorize institutions of policing as arbiters of whiteness as a racial discourse. Hollingsworth feels through her seeing, and through her feelings sees, what’s to come and what will always come for disabled, deaf, Black, and racialized people as long as institutions of policing continue to exist unquestioned and untroubled as normative fixtures of everyday life. Just as the poor don’t wake up to breakfast, to quote James Baldwin (1985), normalcy does not wake up to attention. In a realm of the visible where what the police see is taken as ultimate truth, the culture of sight is nourished by what Jose Miguel Esteban (2023) calls, “a world of observation, still-ness, and entrapment” that when unnoticed, eclipses the storying of life and living in strictly biological terms. Facing biology as storyteller opens us to how we are trained to perceive the body according to linear patterns— a body with hands, a back, and hands that may be put behind a back (the stock police command is not, for instance, “put your back in front of your hands”). Enacting pause paves the way for us to feel, as Hollingsworth felt, that something is off. Realizing that our feelings on disability, deafness, and race are entangled in the commitments of policing institutions, and being animated by the narrative character of this entanglement, may also make way for what McKittrick (2013) calls, “deciphering plantation logic” (p. 11). How are the police trained to see and how are we trained to see the police? How are we expected to perceive the seeing of policing institutions as desirable, authority, and truth? When we see, who are the storytellers shaping our seeing? In a modern economy that cannot escape its entrenchment in the racialism, to cite Cedric J. Robinson (2020), and that continues to persist in the dominant ways that disability, deafness, and race are storied today, careful and critical reflection is owed to how policing institutions are paid to see and what their seeing is paid to do. A return, or what Titchkosky (2008) calls “a restless reflexive return,” to the realms in which we live can reveal the linear patterns of storytelling that constitute our everyday lives. Revealing linear patterns of problem-people turned trouble-people interrupts narratives that attempt to confine the life, possibility, and complexity of embodied differences. In a global order that insists on narrating humanness in solely biological terms, enacting pause — as return and interruption — is one way to come home to ourselves as storytelling beings. (Elaine now transitions to Tanya) Tanya Disability and Race-Thinking within the University Educated Sensorium Inclusion is good, isn’t it? It sure does feel good. But what really happens with disability, to disabled people, when we are included? How does inclusion appear and for whom? I return to some of Paul Gilroy’s guiding words: There is no raw, untrained perception dwelling in the body. The human sensorium has had to be educated… the visualization of discrete racial groups, [requires] a great deal of fine-tuning. (Gilroy, 2000: 42) A fine tuning must go on when we perceive an “inclusion problem” organizing the visualization of discrete categories of who is in and who is out, what is accessible and what is not. This too must train the human sensorium [how we sense]. To consider this I turn to the appearance of disability in University inclusion statements oriented to disability (Ahmed, 2006:12). The point is not to regard such statements as good or bad but as ways that our sensorium receives an education on how to perceive people. The university is an ideal place to conduct such an exploration since there we encounter practices of inclusion designed by the supposed “the brightest and the best” (Wynter, 1994, NHI: 43) whose sensorium has been educated by professional schools of thought. It is the place, too, where, as Sylvia Wynter (1994, NHI: 44) says “the ‘inner eyes’ with which we look with our physical eyes upon reality” are trained. Since the world wars (and because of them and colonialism), every Western university has its stories of individual disabled people “included” and thus represented in official histories, president reports, or other archived materials, occasionally in oral mythologies. Prior to any legal mandate to include (Stiker, 1999), there are stories about disabled people included and they seem to be the exception that proves the rule to exclude most disabled people from Universities and perceive this as normal. The norm of exclusion is obvious in practices such as medical tests far beyond discerning the absence of an infectious disease; the measuring of the student body for its ability to participate in athletics (or a swimming test to enter dentistry), through university procedures that explicitly stated that disabled applicants need not apply, and through slightly less obvious practices such as not providing accessible dorms or classrooms or washrooms or learning materials (Titchkosky, 2022; Dolmage, 2018; Price, 2011; McGuire and Fritch, 2019; Slee, 2018; Ware, 2020). However, with the advent of the UN Declaration of the International Year of Disabled People (IYDP) in 1981, accompanied by other changes in law (Prince, 2009), this taken-for-granted sense of disabled people _as_ naturally excludable was disrupted. The UN declared 1981 to be the year where there would be some sort of equalization of opportunities, as well as focus on rehabilitation and the prevention of disabilities. In Canada, (soon after signing on to the UN IYDP), there was the passage of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada, 1982). The Charter, the highest law of the land, made it illegal to discriminate on a variety of grounds – “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability,” Or, so it was written by 1985[1]. Disability was, however, a ground for exclusion that almost every university practiced as a matter of course. And still does. Nonetheless, these legal shifts soon provoked universities to respond. The University of Toronto, where I have worked since 2006, developed its very first statement “affirming the inclusion” of disabled people in 1981. In the administrative archive with ABD Maddy DeWelles, we found that this statement was circulated widely, e.g., in meeting minutes, distributed to all faculties, and published in the student newspaper and other newsletters. While mostly forgotten, it represents a common way of perceiving disability as a problem. (For earlier versions and further discussions of this see Titchkosky, 2022; Titchkosky & DeWelles, 2020). If you have spent any time in university meetings, in any other bureaucracy, or involved in campus disability politics, you will sense the familiar. Facing this historical repetition is a way of attending to the perception of disability that makes this policy possible, sense-able, sayable* – and thus a critical hesitation is necessary. [slide] Approved in principle by Governing Council on March 26, 1981 The University and Accessibility for Disabled Persons The University of Toronto, with a very large number of old buildings and sprawling urban campus, can present a formidable challenge to disabled persons. Adaptations have been made to Erindale and Scarborough, but the situation on the St. George campus remains difficult. The task of reviewing the University’s facilities in terms of physical accessibility, assigning priorities for improvements, and finding funds for the changes that will be necessary is equally formidable. The financial aspect is particularly troubling at a time when the University’s needs in so many areas are acute, its resources eroded and its prospects for relief in the near future dim. Given these constraints, it must be recognized that progress will be slow. However, the University has made a beginning, and intends, to the extent that is possible, to take the following steps toward improving accessibility in the months and years ahead. 1. The University endorses in principle the objectives of the United Nations General Assembly resolution proclaiming 1981 as the International Year of Disabled Persons. 2. The University will continue to develop administrative procedures to facilitate the integration of disabled persons into the University community including academic, administrative and support services. 3. The University will encourage faculty and staff to make accommodations for the requirements of disabled persons. -2- 4. The University will seek funding with a view to ensuring that its buildings, services, and programmes are made accessible where feasible. The goal shall be a major improvement in accessibility within ten years [not reading =]according to a list of priorities established in consultation preferably with recognized groups of disabled persons at the University of Toronto, or failing such groups, with disabled members of the University community. When significant structural alterations are made or new facilities are built the needs of disabled persons will be considered. 5. The University will consult and work with other academic institutions in the province in the belief that the needs and issues require a co-operative effort on a system-wide basis. 6. The administration will place before the Budget Advisory Committee on an annual basis an appreciation of the University’s progress in making the campus accessible to the physically handicapped and a set of recommendations for continuing improvements. Office of the Vice-President— Personnel and Student Affairs February 12, 1981 The main assumption? Disabled people _are now_ potentially partial participants who might be included but only as an unexpected expense. While not necessary participants, we are necessarily expensive ones. Still, if included, it will be as a considered expense. Facilities, budgets, priorities, programs, policies, so much!, are depicted not only as necessary but also as set against the inclusion of disabled people. Tying the potential participant to a partial and precarious status is the sense that constraints in the physical and social environment are to be perceived as natural/expected; disabled people are not perceived as such. The sensorium has had an education! See hostile social environments, perceive nature! “That’s just the way things are.” See disabled people precariously positioned struggling to participate, perceive an unnecessary and even unwelcome struggle. The university educated sensorium is one able to perceive disabled people as vulnerable to established universities' ways since we can’t claim reciprocity. After all “the needs of the University are acute” making the possibility of change “dim”. Disability “is” an administrative problem of shifting import since disability is not regarded as natural or as a needed taken-for-granted aspect of university life (Finkelstein, 1998; Stiker 1999). Disabled people are incorporated as an object of concern but not imagined as part of the “intersubjective, social humanity, in its species being”, as Gilroy (2000: 46-47) puts it. As a problem, as an unexpected object, disability serves the University as an end point for any sense of our shared human fragility. The university sensorium has been educated to perceive disability as the end of any needed reciprocity between people. Insofar as some people are trained to see some other people as the endpoint of reciprocity, the physical and social environment remains exactly as it is. This, suggests Paul Gilroy, is race thinking. Race, as a formation tied to thinking and acting, can be read as a consequence of the fissures used to degrade some lives in ways that sustain the structure of the world through what can be conceived of today as the “coloniality of power” (Alcoff, 2007; Mignolo 2001; 2014; Wynter 1994; 2003). Gilroy (2000: 40; 53) explicates how the making of race both involves and goes beyond the color line, knitting “science and superstition” together in “micro and macro” ways of perceiving the body made to fit hierarchical notions of normal humans and their Others. This is not to say that the seeing of color is not part of racism; But, I am suggesting that the fine tuning of “seeing color” read as a sign of a lesser human, is not steeped in eyes that see, nor in skin color, but in cultures that determine versions of humans. For example, much fine tuning goes into making people perceive who has to be responded to and who is outside of a reciprocity of recognition. The seeing of color is made possible by a sensorium finely tuned to a hierarchy of humanity. This is part of raciological perception and it is everywhere e.g., Signing - - “What did you say? I am Deaf.” Yelling: “Put your hands behind your back!” Patient to Doctor: What time is it? Doctor to Patient: Have you taken your meds yet? Worker to Boss: I need to go pee. Boss to Worker: Have you signed in to work yet? Person sitting on the street: Buddy, do you have a coin? Passerby – passes by. 72,654 Palestinian’s injured says the news report; The News and its watchers move on to the next news item. For a sensorium educated in racioloigcal perception, disability is normally sensed as a version of the lesser-other. Structured as such, few alternatives are imagined. By pausing in the face of disability-designations to consider how they are aspects of a race-thinking, it is possible to receive a jolt and start to notice what in the world has provided for limitted/ing perception. By attending to how we typically perceive disability as a fissure in the expected and normal goings-on of daily life, we can learn something about the borders that disability is made to outline and how disabled people are typically perceived as not-quite legitimate subjects. Disability conventionally appears as if it is a natural way to delineate the borders of belonging, participation, and even the boundaries of thought and politics (Goodley, 2023, Depathologising the university); Goodley and Michalko, 2023). Noticing this (perhaps) we can reawaken imagination that is more life affirming. Whether our own disability or that of others, “normal” perceptions of disability carry “into the core of contemporary concerns the same anxieties about the basis upon which races exist” (Gilroy, 2000: 40), concerns such as the body when conceived in strictly functional terms that is made a sign of a lesser-being serving only as “material resources to be exploited… unknown information to be surveilled” (Al-Saji, 2018: 348). As objects upon which science operates and as fodder for the medical industry, disabled people are made into “The vulnerable” without reciprocity (Michalko, 2022: 108-114; see also Hughes). The urgent pause is what we need since how we perceive informs any sense of our relations affecting all that we do, all that we say, including the stories we tell about who is a problem and how to solve it. [1] [Not reading] The prohibited grounds for discrimination continue to change. In the province of Ontario, Canada today, “The grounds are: citizenship, race, place of origin, ethnic origin, colour, ancestry, disability, age, creed, sex/pregnancy, family status, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, receipt of public assistance (in housing) and record of offences (in employment).” At U of T as of 2016, disability was finally included as a prohibited ground which today reads “Article 9: No Discrimination. The parties agree that there shall be no discrimination, interference, restriction, or coercion exercised or practised toward any faculty member or librarian in respect to salaries, fringe benefits, pensions, rank, promotion, tenure, reappointment, dismissal, research or other leaves, or any other terms and conditions of employment by reason of age, race, creed, colour, disability, national origin, citizenship, religious or political affiliation or belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status or family status, place of residence, membership or activity in the Association, or any activity pursuant to the principles of academic freedom set out in Article 5, as well as any other ground included in or added to the Ontario Human Rights Code.” [Words 1960 - about 400 words I am not reading]