Introductory Remarks Disability and Reparations, Dr. Lauren Shallish
Disability and Reparations: From Haunting to Hope | Dr. Linda Steele
Lauren Shallish, Co-Principal Investigator
Thursday, October 24, 2024 | 3:00 – 4:00 pm
Welcome and thank you everyone for joining us for today’s talk on disability and reparations: from haunting to hope with Dr. Linda Steele. My name is Lauren Shallish I’m a faculty member in the Dept of Urban Education at Rutgers-Newark and for a visual description I’m a whites woman in her 40s with long hair and blue eyes. Today’s event is part of the Mellon Foundations’ Sawyer Seminar Series on Reparative Futures. Our thanks go to the Mellon Foundation and our Rutgers Newark sponsors for making this webinar possible. This event is also part of Rutgers University’s month-long disability awareness programming which is a university-wide effort to increase understanding about the disabled experience and center local knowledges and lived experience as expertise. Today’s event is on disability and reparations.
Before I introduce Dr. Steele I wanted to provide brief context for our participants on the relevance of this issue to our work here at Rutgers and the state of New Jersey. In the words of Dr. Steele, “one of the primary oppressions experienced by disabled people is that they are marked as perpetually available for all kinds of intrusions, public and private. Disability is a lawful and legitimate basis on which to circumvent equality and drastically shift the thresholds of violence and justice, whether in immigration restrictions, exploitative wages in sheltered workshops, non-consensual sterilization, removal of children from disabled parents by the social welfare system and segregation/even caging in schools.”
To put it simply: Today people with disabilities are more likely to be found in spaces of confinement than anywhere else. Confinement can mean prisons and jails and also nursing homes, psychiatric facilities, restrictive special education placements, sheltered workshops, hospitals, and foster care placements and family removal systems. Confinement also exists in interpersonal, carcerally-influenced dynamics like prescribing practices, maintenance of chemical incarceration, and in any number of decontextualized and intensely gendered and racialized DSM definitions. Higher education is far more responsible for all of this than it wants to admit, given its ownership in the training and credentialing of various service sectors that pervade the lives of the disabled or those marked and politicized as such.
Colleges and universities — particularly those with medical colleges, schools of education, and even law schools (like our own)— have historically been tied to the promotion and maintenance of eugenics or the science of designing a “master race” of people. It was assumed that Eugenics would be a benefit to society in that it would result in a dramatic reduction of costs of having to care for the “sick” and incarcerated. Such labels of deficiency were believed to be genetically inherited qualities rather than products of racialized, ableist and sanist social inequities.
Eugenics flourished in higher education, whereby graduates from fields of psychology, medicine, and education were hired as faculty and researchers at local institutions that warehoused the disabled. Medical testing and experimentation was quick to infiltrate the field of education where scholars believed intelligence was a fixed, biological, racially determined characteristic. Eugenics attempted to justify binary constructions of normal/pathological, autonomous/dependent, and competent citizen/ward of the state thereby subjecting bodies and minds to the horrors of what Foucault describes as “bio power.” The University of Virginia was an epicenter of the eugenics movement, as was Henry Goddard’s rampant research conducted in our home state of New Jersey on the scientific category of “moron.”
Eugenics was largely sanctioned practice from the 1800s to 1960s and was central to many research agendas, faculty promotional materials, and funding opportunities in higher education and related research partners. It flourished because, writes Erevelles (2017), “The logic of disability as a dangerous pathology helped create a moral panic… and required that something be done about this rampant social liability” (p. 92). This is still true today.
Here in New Jersey, we have one of the top five highest rates of institutionalization in the entire country. Today around 2,000 people with developmental disabilities alone in New Jersey are housed in nursing homes “contrary to their wishes” and in violation of their constitutional rights because the state does not properly evaluate their needs or give them the option of living more independently. But as a state we are also home to the founding of the National Black Disability Coalition. Dorothea Dix was, at the time, a radical disabilty organizer and her founding of the Trenton Pyschiatric Hospital was considered a revolutionary design at the time of its inception. And it is now state code to teach disability history in schools. And here at Rutgers-Newark we founded the first disability studies program at the university, one of only a handful in the nation.
To keep the momentum and learning going we are honored by Dr. Linda Steele’s presence with us today, she is a leading scholar on this topic of disability and reparations. Dr. Steele is an associate professor at University of Technology Sydney Law Faculty and Adjunct Associate Professor at University of South Australia. She is a visiting scholar at Harvard University and currently leading a program of research, “Truth, Justice, and Repair” exploring how we reckon with and repair the harms of violence, institutionalization, and segregation of disabled people. She is the author of Disability, Criminal Justice, and Law: Reconsidering Court Diversion and co-editor of Sites of Conscience: Place, Memory, and the Project of Deinstitutionalization, The Legacies of Institutionalization, and Normalcy and Disability. I also just want to add in addition to her brilliance and scholarly contributions, she’s just a lovely person to spend time with. She is doing today’s webinar from Australia where it is already Friday and also it’s very early in the morning. Thank you, Dr. Steele, for your presence today and for the thoughtful words that we are about to hear in today’s lecture that will remain with us in the years to come.