The Thin Line Between Pity and Violence

For a long time, I have been fascinated by the idea of pity.  As people with disabilities, it is something that we experience every day.  While true empathy is something that this world does not have enough of, pity seems to be something altogether different.  In my experience, empathy, the ability to place yourself in someone else’s position, causes a person to want to understand another’s struggle and help them with it.  Empathy drives a desire to ask questions about what a person needs and how their life could be improved.  Pity, on the other hand, has no element of common understanding.  Pity is not in the business of asking questions, but rather imposing answers.  Someone who has pity on another seeks to assert themselves in a position of dominance, showing the person who is the object of their pity that they are, and will always be, subjugated. 

Until very recently, public policies and social norms dealing with people who have disabilities have been driven by pity rather than empathy.  Empathy drives recent reform like the ADA or the Community Choice Act that focus on the liberation of being able to access public space, move around the community freely with good transportation, contribute to the workforce, and live in the community among friends and family. 

However, we can be sure that the reaction of pity is still alive and well in the public sphere.  It is still pity that drives Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day Telethon where he parades children with Muscular Dystrophy in front of the camera for 24 hours, telling of how horrible their lives are and how badly a cure is needed.  Pity is also the source of the billions of dollars spent searching for cures for disabilities through state and federal funding of the human genome project and stem cell research while the pitiful funding that would help people with disabilities live well as they are is under the constant threat of being cut or eliminated.

Of course, as people with disabilities, we also know the first hand experience of pity in our daily lives.  When it comes to everything from prospective dates to prospective employers, we know how it feels to have someone pity us.  We make them very sad.  They feel very bad for us.  But, they never would dream of accepting us as their equal.  Pity is the very thinly veiled assertion of power.  To be pitied is to be told that we are less than.  People assert their dominance by vehemently underscoring the difference of the other and establishing themselves as superior.  Empathy draws forth the attitude of “I will help you because I could be you,” where pity is the expression of “I will help you because I want to show how I am NOT like you.”

Sometimes that thin veil that hides the true nature of pity is fleetingly lifted and we get an unobstructed view of its ugliness. For example on May 20, 2001, when an interviewer with CBS Sunday Morning suggested that pity may be a harm rather than a good for people with disabilities, Jerry Lewis responded with violent anger, "Pity? [If] you don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in ya house!"

Some of the same social attitudes and beliefs that typically get expressed as pity can quickly and easily boil over into violence when someone REALLY wants to feel dominant.  There has always been violence toward people with disabilities of one sort or another.  Some of it has been institutionalized violence like the Nazi’s T4 program to systematically murder German citizens with disabilities – ironically according to Wikipedia the name T4 was “an abbreviation of “Tiergartenstraße 4”, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care. [emphasis added]”  Some of the violence has been more subtle, like the assertion of power that comes when an entire class of people are imprisoned in nursing homes and state run institutions, despite having committed no crime.

The most recent instance of violence against a person with a disability that has everyone talking is that of Brian Sterner, a quad who was dumped from his wheelchair in Florida recently by a police deputy.  The deputy “didn’t believe him” when Sterner said two or three times that he was paralyzed and could not stand up to be frisked.  The surveillance camera footage that caught the violent episode shows, in the background, other deputies chuckling at Sterner laying on the ground.  This incident may seem isolated and outrageous, but hate crimes and other violence against people with disabilities happen pretty regularly.  The abuse of people with intellectual disabilities is particularly pervasive and there is reason to believe that it is also underreported.

The bottom line seems to be that we, people with disabilities, are a class that are subjugated to the extent that the socially acceptable response to our situation, pity, seems to be only a hairs breath away from full on violence.  I hope that someday we see more empathy and less domination.  As an aside, according to a friend who personally knows Sterner, he plays murderball and is in grad school working on a degree in philosophy, so I have particular empathy for him.  :)