Pride

Over the years I have written about the part-ideological, part-emotional, part-tribal experience of defining some human kind as a distinct people with its own history, culture and political interests.

I've observed these threads in ethnic movements, in feminism, in thinking about the rights of the disabled, in movements built on sexual identity. And I've written about activists interested in doing the same for dwarves, deaf people, the intersexed, and people with attention deficit disorder.

What interests me in these movements is what they prove about how the mind works: They show that human beings don't inherit their tribal identities. Instead, we create them, using whatever basis is convincing, and then struggle to persuade others (and ourselves) about our beliefs. Identity is an endless conversation. This is as true of an identity like ``Puerto Rican'' as it is of the identity promoted by the Little People of America.

I don't write out of a desire to debunk (the LPA is a great group). If an identity movement flourishes, it must be doing something good for those who take it up, and people who say ADD is valuable way of being (``a hunter in a farmer's world'') are not any less legitimate just because they got inspiration from deaf activists, who got inspiration from gay activists, who got inspiration from the American movement for racial equality.

Nor am I trying to say that all these movements are crudely alike, or raise the same issues. Race, gender, sexual orientation and disability are different bases for classing people, and the moral questions they pose are distinct.

A case in point: The new movement for ``Autistic Pride.''

As with the other disability rights movements (including ADD), the claim for ``acceptance, not cure'' here demands responses from the ``normal'' that aren't at stake when the dividing lines are racial, ethnic, religious or sexual.

Put simply, disabled people need help to get through a world made for the non-disabled. If they are to be accepted, not cured, then they have a right to that help. And that means they have a right to demand more time, effort and patience of you than the next person walking down the street. At some point, that demand begins to be an encroachment on your rights.

A couple of years ago, the lawyer and activist Harriet McBryde Johnson wrote this article about her debate with the philosopher Peter Singer, whom she despises for suggesting that severely disabled people like her might not wish to go on living.

In the course of the essay, she described her all-important assistant (``Carmen lifts me into my chair and straps a rolled towel under my ribs for comfort and stability. She tugs at my clothes to remove wrinkles that could cause pressure sores.'') And I found myself wondering about Carmen. Johnson's day took up two lives. When did Carmen get to do what she wanted, instead of being another person's legs, hands and fingers?

I think this consideration may be part of the tension in the arguments beginning about ``autistic pride.'' There are families that want a cure, not acceptance, and part of the reason is the price they have paid in time, pain and isolation because autistic people do not fit into the world created by non-autistics.

Perhaps they have a point. I'm not sure, but there must be some criterion by which we say, ``your pride cannot come at the cost of another person's humiliation.''

And yet. Human-kind emotions are such that this don't-hurt-me argument could be made against any effort to achieve human rights for anyone. Human kinds have a powerful link to our moral emotions. We all have a strong feeling that certain things are not right for us to do or be around, because of the sort of people we are. And this feeling is often unethical and cruel in its effects.

There were whites in the South in the 1950's who said they would be pained to share a lunch counter with black people; men who said a wife treated as an equal would leave them emasculated; social conservatives who say equal treatment for gay couples gives them pain.

So, a countervailing principle: Your avoidance of human-kind pain (``that's not what people like me should live with'') cannot come at the cost of another's greater pain.

I'm not sure how these two principles fit together. In other words, I'm unsure how much respect has to be accorded to new human kinds, on the one hand, and to deeply felt emotions based on the moral aspect of human kinds, on the other. But I think the disability rights movements will make this debate more frequent and more anguished in the future.