SIO516: How a Botched 1840 Census "Proved" Freedom Made Black Americans Disabled, with Sari Altschuler

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 516. I'm Thomas Smith, and today I've got a really fascinating interview for you. So Lydia and I keep an eye on what books are coming out that we might want to check out and maybe interview the authors, and one came across our, I don't know, internet, that just was perfectly up our alley here. It's called Before Disability, A History of American Citizenship by Professor Sari Altshuler. And it tells the fascinating history that I'm sure 99% of us are not familiar with because I really don't think this is taught much. I was reflecting on it when we were talking and I was thinking back to now I know as a kid with ADHD, it's often unreliable to be like, wow, they never taught me this in school because it's entirely possible they did. And I don't remember. But I'm pretty confident on this one that with the exception of maybe the, you know, Americans with Disabilities Act and some of that history, like the main sort of legislative history that we might have learned about, there isn't a whole lot taught on disability going back to the very first decades of the founding and in the 1800s. And it turns out there's really interesting, obviously the history would be interesting, but also as you notice in the title, A History of American Citizenship, that intersection just seems so fascinating to us. And it seems like it touches on so many things we care about on the show. So we're going to talk to Sari about her new book and about her and about the research and really fascinating stories involved in this book. We're going to learn a lot, a lot of things that it's like, how have I never heard this before? It's going to be a lot of fun. So we'll take our usual first break, which you can avoid at patreon.com/seriouspod. And that's where you can support conversations like these, trying to bring you important things that just don't get enough, I guess, press or whatever, for lack of a better word. So if that's something you care about, please support it or tell someone about the show. Share the show, Professor Sari Altshuler. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really interested in your

0:02:15 Sari: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so I'm an English professor.

0:02:17 Thomas: Book before disability. It's just right up our alley here. And it's got so many, so many things we talk about all the time. I'm curious about you, though. How did you get started in this kind of research and work and what's your background? Oh, wow. Well, that's really fascinating. And I love

0:02:31 Sari: I've been writing about the relationship between humanity's approaches to health and disability for a really long time. But my interest actually started when I was a kid. My dad has type 1 diabetes, and there were a lot of things that made his life difficult. A lot of stigma, especially in the 1980s when I really was like a school-age kid. You know, every time we went out to dinner, there would be people who gave us looks because he needed to use syringes to eat. This is the height of the so-called war on drugs. So there's a lot of stigma attached to that. But at the same time, he didn't really narrate it as this story only of stigma, but also of, he actually wrote a piece about this for Diabetes Forecast magazine, what he calls the gifts of diabetes. Diabetes kept him out of the Vietnam War. He became an actor later in life. Diabetes helped him get into actor's equity. So it really, I think, gave him as much as it presented hardships. And I was kind of interested in that complexity and his sort of micro story of his relationship to citizenship through a disability made me interested in the sort of longer history of sort of more complicated relationship between disability and citizenship. Yeah.

0:03:45 Thomas: To, you know, it's something that I think as just a, I don't know, everyday American type guy, like I feel like we don't learn much, if anything, about the history of disability. I can't think back to any class I've had or any, you Know, I just, I'm just racking my brain. It feels like something that's not talked about very much. Yeah, for sure. Well why don't you take us through some

0:04:02 Sari: Yeah. I think even within the sort of disability advocacy, disability rights movements, you get a really recent history of disability. So you get a history that goes back to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, precipitated by an event called the Capitol Crawl, where people who use wheelchairs crawled up the steps in Washington, D.C. to kind of illustrate how inaccessible federal buildings were. But yeah, you don't really hear a lot about it going back, I think, to the 18th and 19th century to the founding of the nation. And so I was kind of interested in what that story was, especially because even within the field of disability history, there's a lot of work on the late 19th century into the 20th century. But there really wasn't very much work at all on the relationship of disability at the founding of The Country and the scholarship more generally. So that's true generally. We don't hear much about it. And it's also even true within the field. So yes, I think more and more people thankfully are kind of doing this work and it's getting out there, but it's been a slow, a slow journey, I Think I really have been seriously writing it for about 10 years. But I, I wrote an essay that came out in 2010. I think I wrote it in 2008. That was really the sort of germ of this. So I have been thinking about it for a really long time.

0:05:08 Thomas: Some of the things that, you know, I'm sure it was really interesting going back through all that. How much research went into this? Like how long did it take to write this book? Oh my gosh.

0:05:34 Sari: But yeah, a lot of research. I mean, I think in part, some of the trouble was that our sort of current idea about disability, which is to say that there are these, what we call the social model of disability, which is that there Are these sort of body and mind conditions, characteristics that are stigmatized in culture that come out of a kind of medical idea of body and mind differences, that whole concept of disability doesn't exist until the 20th century. Well, the concept begins in the 19th century, as I sort of talk about a bit in my book, but the word isn't disability until much later. And those of listeners who are a little older may remember that the dominant word was handicap for a long time. So I think part of the problem with the history is that the word doesn't mean the same thing earlier. Totally. Yeah. And also that the experiences of people who lived with those conditions in those mental and physical states were actually quite different. That's sort of also part of the story of the book is that, you know, if you think about it, there is something that feels a little strange about saying that a person who identifies as autistic has something in common with someone who has type one diabetes has something

0:06:19 Thomas: Right. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it is always interesting with these things where, especially now, you now, I am turning 40 soon and it is not like that is that old, but you know within my memory it is like, well, every word we used to say for stuff that even was thought to be like the respectful word was like completely offensive now. It is like Yeah. I mean, it seems like it's good that people are more able to be in control of what other people are referring to them as. That seems like a good thing. But it also seems like there's been such a confusion on a lot of this. So are you saying it was kind of like more of a patchwork of things? Like it wasn't thought of as one coherent thing as much? It feels like we had all these kind of differing terms for very specific things, but maybe not looked at as a whole like that? Hmm. Right. Sure. Gotta be stigma and stuff too, right? Hmm. I never think about Tiresias. Sorry. Right, right. Hmm. That's interesting. Oh boy, I hear that. As somebody who was born with a congenital ear thing where it's, you know, I'm not, I don't think I'm deaf, although I actually, before I ask any more questions, maybe what's the definition of disability to you? That might be a good place to start.

0:07:27 Sari: Something in common with someone who is deaf. That kind of amalgamation is, I mean, in a lot of ways, it's really a political act in the present to say, we all experience these kinds of stigma. They're rooted in these ideas about the body and mind. And so we're going to join together to advocate for our rights. But then when you look more carefully at the groups, and especially the history of their experiences, they're wildly different. So part of what I was interested in the book was like, all right, you know, what were the experiences of deaf Americans in the revolutionary and early national periods? What were the experiences of, you know, people who are identified as being insane? What were the experiences of Blind Americans? And it turns out they're all radically different from one another. That's sort of part of my interest in the story as well, is to say, like, there are good political reasons for joining those experiences together in the current moment, especially for advocacy. But in the past, there were a lot of reasons why people who had different kinds of mental and physical differences did not want to be joined or thought about in the same kind of breath in the past. And that had to do with different kinds of rights, different kinds of treatment, different cultural ideas about what it meant. Totally. So like we have all these experiences or cultural narratives about, for example, blindness that actually have to do with like privileged insight, you know, so you think about Tiresias or you think — you never think about Tiresias. Okay, well, that's fine. Well, you think about Milton, right? Like the blind poet. And we have this idea that justice is viewed as blind. So blindness is actually often associated and has a very long history of being associated with privileged insight. Deafness, on the other hand, actually, until really the late 18th century into the early 19th century, is often associated with cognitive impairment. So people who were deaf were also thought to maybe not be smart. Sure, no, I'm happy to talk about it. Yeah, I mean, I think now disability is, there are different models of thinking about it, but disability is something that interferes with normal life activities. That's the way that the Americans with Disabilities Act thinks about disability. So it's a mental or a physical state that interferes with the way you go about things that you do in your daily life. The social model of disability is a reaction to a kind of medical idea that this is a problem and instead says, look, there's like a wide variety of ways that, you know, of bodies and minds in the world, and we should really celebrate that kind of diversity, and that the problem is a social problem. The problem is in society. The problem is not located in biology, for example. But if you go all the way back to the 18th century where this book begins, disability is actually a legal term. And what it means most often is something that stops you from having access to a kind of right. So for example, you cannot claim

0:10:42 Thomas: Oh, sorry. Just to clarify, did you mean traitor or like, or I didn't understand. Oh, okay. Okay. Where are we talking about with this? Okay. Gotcha. Okay, I'm with you. No, no, no. Just making sure. Yeah. Was that a disability? Like just because by dint of birth or whatever? Oh, that's so interesting. Wow.

0:10:44 Sari: Claim land because your grandfather was a traitor. So if it turns out that your grandfather was not a traitor, or you were, and this is the words that they would have used in the 18th century, or you were a bastard, so you don't have a right to land. Oh, traitor. T-R-A-I-T-O-R. Yeah. Oh, England. So a lot of the law in the US is based on British common law. Yes, sorry. A little in the weeds. Yes. That's a definition. In fact, most of the things that were called disabilities had nothing to do with bodies or minds. They had everything to do with kind of situations that stopped you from having access to some kind of legal option or right. So, yeah, and we still see this kind of definition of disability as a kind of situational thing. We just don't think about it that way. So, you know, you're driving down the road and you see a sign and the sign says disabled vehicle. That is that sort of older sense of disability. It's not legal. Or, for example, your phone might be disabled, right, by an update. That's the 18th, 19th century sense of the word disability. And it only becomes biological conceptually in the mid-19th century. And that word only sort of comes to name that category in the 20th century? Absolutely, yes.

0:11:35 Thomas: Wow. That's so interesting. So being like a bastard was like a disability, definitionally? Oh, that's so interested. Wow. Huh. Right. Right, sure. Yeah. And is it not

0:12:14 Sari: That's The Example used in Samuel Johnson's dictionary. So, you know, it's a, yeah, I mean, and it's The Example that legal dictionaries of the time used as well. By the way, being a woman was also a disability. So yeah, yes, it's a different category. What

0:12:31 Thomas: Just a case of like, well, they had different words for different things, and we're talking about an actual kind of different category? It's just that the word was different? Or was it kind Kind of. Yeah. Well, what ties together? Is it literally just the word or was I guess you're saying like how they're treated and the ability to have certain legal rights and stuff is the similarity to because it's there are things where it's like, well, that's just a artifact of language that this one word means this now and that then I'm struggling to think of an example.

0:12:51 Sari: Ties together the category in the past? Or how did it become tied to? Sure. Lots of them. So

0:13:02 Thomas: But there are those examples. I'm just curious if it's that kind of thing versus it is still the same concept in a way, but just the definition was different enough. And then eventually over time it kind of became what it is now. Okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah, very interesting. So back on

0:13:16 Sari: Yeah, so I'm going to say both. I think what part of what I'm interested in is how that kind of legacy of this legal language about access to citizenship and access to rights informs our our current understanding of the word disability. That that's its history seems really important to me when we're thinking about what it means to use the word disability in the present. But the sort of idea of bringing together deafness, blindness, insanity, so-called idiocy together under one category, that happens way before disability is the word to name it. And that happens, part of what I'm interested in is how that happens in part through debates about whether or not Black people should become American citizens in the antebellum era.

0:14:05 Thomas: To what I was talking about a second ago, I also imagine in terms of identity, there is a thing where like, I just think about maybe my situation. I don't think I have a disability. Well, I guess

0:14:15 Sari: Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course. Yeah. That's absolutely true. I mean, estimates are such that currently

0:14:18 Thomas: I have ADHD, which can feel like a disability for sure. Um, and maybe is, but when it comes to like my hearing, I've always had hearing loss. Um it's, and it's definitely a challenge, but my impulse is like, well, I wouldn't want to say I'm disabled or I wouldn't want to like, sometimes it feels like a stolen valor thing or something. You know, it's like, you don't want claim something that's like a, you know, yeah, I'm fine. I'm doing okay. I can't here sometimes, but it's not like a huge deal. And I also think some of that, in my mind, it feels like, oh, I just don't want to like, I don't know, infringe on anything or like say I'm anything I'm not. But on the other hand, there could be an unhealthy aspect to it where it's like, you don't wanna be thought of as disabled, you know? And there's gotta be a lot of that going on too throughout history. Right. Sure. Right, right. Yeah. And

0:14:59 Sari: Nationally, we undercount rates of disability by at least 20%. So, you know, there are millions of people who have disabilities who are not counted in, you know, federal tallies of Americans Americans with disabilities. But yeah, I mean, I think you're pointing to, you know, any category has that kind of instability inherent. And there are questions about how and why you claim a category. You know, you might want to claim it because you get access to rights. And this is, I think, one of the interesting things about disability. You think about it as this category, but I think pointed to it in your sort of self-description. We think about it as, oh, it's the stigmatized thing, and we've got to get rid of the stigma and think about, you know, how to be more inclusive. But disability also is a kind of bureaucratic category. And this goes way back in the scholarship to this scholar from the 80s named Deborah Stone. And she says, actually, it kind of gives you access to a lot of rights in addition to kind of taking them away. So for example, you know you can have your sentence changed if you are deemed insane. That's a disability that actually can change the kind of prosecution that you experience in a court, or for example, in my dad's case, you know, he has diabetes, and that meant that he did not need to serve in the military. And so I think we often think about these categories as sources of stigma, but they are, at least in a bureaucratic sense, equally ways of kind of claiming rights, right? You might claim disability benefits. And we can talk about, obviously, people claiming disability benefits are owed those benefits, and we think that the state should support them. But But there is a way as well in which, you know, you have to kind of say that you're disabled in order to get them. It doesn't change your body, mind, state, you know, but it does change your access to benefits or to rights. You know, categories are fluid. And that's one of the things about disability as well, is that we kind of tend to think like, well, that person's disabled. In fact, people who use wheelchairs talk about this all the time, that if you use a wheelchair, but you, you know, can stand on your own, but it really helps you to use a wheelchair, there's a sense of betrayal that people experience when that person then stands up from the wheelchair, like, oh, you're not supposed to do that, right? Like, your category is supposed to be fixed. And that's just not true about most disability. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or like, did

0:17:18 Thomas: And I have to imagine it's got to be somewhat recent and maybe it's somewhat American, but I could be wrong. I'm a lot American. But this idea, you just brought to mind a grocery store or something, the typical thing where it's like someone's using one of those, I don't know, scooter things. And it's if they stand up, somehow everybody's offended or everybody's the policeman of like, oh, wait a minute, you shouldn't. You know, and it's so funny. What is that impulse in it?

0:17:44 Sari: You park in the in the special spot? Yeah. Well, actually, this is a sort of interesting and maybe

0:17:45 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which to be fair, people do take advantage of that, but, but still it's like, we're all like this policeman, you know, for some reason, is that an American thing? Because it just feels like a lot of the conservative movement tries to cast this as like undeserved benefits or something. But I have to imagine you can't go back that far before that would make no sense because of the way we treated people with disabilities. I'm sure like that, that idea that like, oh, you're just claiming that to get this big benefit. You know, I imagine the 1800s or something that would have been absurd to the point of being laughable. Oh, right. That makes

0:18:19 Sari: Horrifying part of the story. So disability benefits for veterans, veteran pensions initially were all about disability from like a month into the Revolutionary War, the government is like, oh, nobody's going to fight if we don't tell them that we're also going to take care of them if something bad happens, right. So, so you get disability benefits as a law passed very, very, very early into the war. And then around 1818, there's a kind of federal surplus. And they're like, you know what, we should like really take more care of those veterans. And so they kind of they begin to expand this category. The veterans of the Revolutionary War are very old at this point in by 1818. You know, the war was over decades and decades ago. So they imagine there aren't that many of them left. But it's, it's really a shame to the nation that we're not taking care of them. So this legislation is passed to expand federal benefits. And just so many more more people apply than they think are going to apply. And it is, it feels catastrophic. So then all of a sudden there starts to be, to your point, all this policing, like, well, are they really in need? Like, are they Really disabled? Are they really poor? There's a lot of policing. I mean, I think veterans have experienced this, unfortunately, since the beginning. But there's a Lot of policing of the kind of benefits that are afforded, you know, both to disabled veterans and also to veterans who are identified as poor, so much so that on the 1840 census, they add a category for these veterans who were receiving pensions. And the point is not to count them so that you can better serve them. The point is to root out fraud. Yeah. Well, then you say like, how many pensions are we giving out? And does that match the number of people that the census actually says, or are all these people coming? And in fact, they had to

0:18:27 Thomas: Sense. Right. Hmm. Hmm, okay. Ah, right? Oh, okay, and so how does that do that exactly? Oh gotcha, okay. Right, okay oh wow, gotcha. Okay, well that's comforting in a way. I'm glad it wasn't

0:20:07 Sari: Eventually like had to take an oath of poverty, it became humiliating. So I do think that that sense of like, you're trying to defraud the government has existed, unfortunately, for a very long time. Is it? Yeah, or your taxes are paying for? Well, I mean, I want to just say

0:20:21 Thomas: Just like Reagan or something, you know. Maybe, yeah, I guess there's two sides to that, but it It does feel like it's, I guess it's kind of a human nature thing that we're pushing against. Like people just don't want to feel like anyone's getting something they don't deserve or whatever. And it's a really powerful, yeah, it's really powerful impulse, I guess, because it's existed forever, apparently, for a very long time.

0:20:44 Sari: Like that sort of the beginning of the book, and this is the more optimistic part is really about how disability is at the center of some articulations of like what American citizenship should be, right? So that's the beginning of the book. I'm interested in how disability over the course of 100 years becomes this sort of more negative thing. And that's one of the stories about how that happens. But one of the sort of early, more utopian ideas is actually what an American citizen could be, what the Republic could show is that everybody could sort of become a citizen, regardless of their mental or physical state. And that impulse exists as well. Yeah, no, it did. It did. Well, I think it's, I mean, honestly, I'm interested in

0:21:21 Thomas: Did it? That's good. It doesn't anymore. Yeah.

0:21:29 Sari: Telling that story because I think people think like, oh, there is an impulse to say like, oh, it was always bad. No matter how far back you go, it wasn't always bad, but we're creating these stories in which kind of the founders and that generation is saying like, ooh, maybe we could, and deafness is a great example here. Maybe we could use sign language to give legal testimony to Deaf Americans. And there are popular plays put on about this possibility. It's actually coming from France, where they were sort of already imagining this kind of utopian future. So that, to me, is, I think, a really powerful place from which to advocate for disability rights. To say, like, look, at the founding, actually, people thought, like, do you know who's an amazing example of, like the promise of American citizenship? Citizenship, it's all these deaf Americans. So it's sort of the opposite. Yeah, in that instance.

0:21:36 Thomas: Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you touched on a lot of the difference in the driving of the definitions was about

0:22:24 Sari: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I just told you that I found, you know, these sort of surprising moments

0:22:41 Thomas: Black citizenship. Did you want to get into that? Yeah, sure. Yeah. What? What does that mean?

0:22:48 Sari: In the past, especially in sort of The really early decades of the nation in which disability is, and especially I want to say, like, especially white disability, because it's a lot of people who are panicking about their kids, who have different mental and physical, you know, are different from. And they want to make sure that they have access to rights and to citizenship. And so that's a lot of the sort of early push behind disability advocacy. But one thing that happens is that as you move into the antebellum era, you know, there's more and more push to end slavery in the United States. And a lot of Black Americans and their advocates are pushing to enfranchise the whole Black population. And as that's happening, there are all of these questions about whether or not Black Americans are fit to be citizens. And one thing that happens, and it happens for a variety of reasons, but part of it is about these kind of Southern doctors that are looking to beef up their own reputation. They start saying, like, actually, we can tell you all about Black bodies and minds and about their impairments. And in response, the abolitionist movement is like, Black people are not impaired. That's the sort of lie that the pro-slavery advocates are using to deny Black citizenship. But what happens is that this condition of bodies and minds becomes wrapped up in this debate about whether or not Black Americans should be afforded all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship for both sides. You know, so pro-slavery people are saying Black bodies and minds are, in fact, biologically inferior and slavery helps to kind of protect them. And freedom is, in effect, I mean, this is these are the arguments, you know, and freedom is in fact disabling for Black Americans. And then all of the people who are for the ending of slavery and inclusion of Black Americans are saying, no, you know, that's not true at all. In fact, slavery is incredibly, it's a disabling institution. You know they don't use those words, but that's the that's the idea. We're going to show you all the ways that slavery is disabling. And thus, freedom has to be about not having a disability. So disability becomes wrapped up in, like, really at the center of this debate in a way that is hugely damaging because, A, there were Black people who had disabilities that both were about slavery and were also not about slavery. But then also disability itself becomes this kind of racialized category, so much so that That actually, to come back to the sort of question of deafness, so much so that sign language and deaf communities become cast as this kind of racialized foreign body within the United States. That's Alexander Graham Bell, who gave other things to American society, but unfortunately was like hugely against sign language. He did not want the creation of a deaf foreign race within the united states. Yeah. He thought that if deaf people were signing with each other all the time and were getting married and having kids, that you would have this whole race of deaf people. I mean, it's like, well, the telephone is actually part of that story as well. So, and that's in the late 19th century, but there is this kind of eugenic moment where it's horrific. You should not let deaf people marry each other because they're going to become a racialized domestic foreign body.

0:25:48 Thomas: Who aren't using my telephones? Yeah. Yeah, actually, I've learned about some of this on

0:26:08 Sari: Well, a race in the sort of older, in the older sense of things, right? Like that, that they are like their own kind of strain of American. Yes. Oh, yeah, totally. But if they start speaking another language, which is the way that Alexander Graham Bell and all these anti-sign language people, right, they would become not Americans. They become foreigners, essentially.

0:26:11 Thomas: On this show before, but what's the racial part? I get the deafness part, but how is it in a different sense? Oh, okay. Gotcha. Yeah. Well, it seemed like you were saying something about, because you were talking about blackness and about foreign styles. So was there xenophobic ideas tied into that or was that just, okay, but I guess my question was going to be like white Americans also can be deaf. What is, I don't get it. Oh, then they're not Americans or something wow right okay gotcha wow hmm oh wow yeah right right huh now when it comes to

0:26:49 Sari: And you can hear in that, I think you can hear in the echo also of stigma against Native Americans, right? We were a domestic dependent nation. So, yeah. Yeah, it's awful. But also I want to say, like, unimaginable at the founding. That's the wild part to me. That these kind of racialized eugenic ideas that happen in the kind of second half of the 19th century, they're unimaginable at the early 19th century where everybody's like, actually, we'll just use sign language and then, you know, like Like if somebody comes and robs your house and you're deaf, you can say that's the guy that did it.

0:27:29 Thomas: Slavery and and black people is that a separate thing to deafness or that's part of it too I'm sorry I'm not understanding yeah yeah it's these are those weird ideas

0:27:32 Sari: Yeah, that's part of it. So, no, I know. Yes. No, I could be clearer. I could be clearer.

0:27:41 Thomas: Hmm what does that mean okay okay thanks sure

0:27:41 Sari: So one of the things that happens, and I think this is both representative of and also a driver of this kind of shift, is that on the 1840 census, the results are wild. It appears to show that freedom makes Black people disabled. So you get on the census. The census has these new categories, blind, deaf, insane, and under insane, also so-called idiocy. It means severe cognitive impairment. I'm saying so-called idiocy because it's quite a stigmatized term. And so I don't want to just use that label without flagging that it's not great. So on the 1840 census, all of a sudden, it appears that Black people are, by orders of of magnitude, more deaf, more insane, more blind in the northern states, and as you go up, even more so than they are in the southern states where slavery exists. And the pro-slavery advocates, including really sort of most importantly, John C. Calhoun, who's Secretary of State at the time, is like, see, we need slavery because freedom is disabling for Black people. So these categories that had existed on the census, they were put there in the 1830s to kind of fund schools to make people citizens, get sort of co-opted by the pro-slavery movement to deny Black people citizenship. And the results are so egregious that at the time, there's this huge debate about like, what even happened here? Obviously, these things are wrong. For example, there are towns in Massachusetts where there are 12 Black deaf people, but no Black people. So, so how did that happen? Yeah. No, there's no, the census produces these

0:29:24 Thomas: Oh that can't be right I thought you're gonna just tell me it's because in the south they just like mark slave and they don't do any more detail oh it's not that oh so they actually

0:29:36 Sari: Wild nationwide numbers really messed it up. And then there's like a whole debate in Congress about whether or not they need to go back and figure out why it got so messed up. Um, and there's a lot of reasons. Yeah. Or what's going to happen. But then they charge the person who was in charge of producing the original numbers with going back and he's like, looks good to me. So it's really, it's this kind of really intense story about the ways that,

0:29:39 Thomas: Messed it up oh wow or if they should just roll with it well for sure it sounds like just counting though like is it at what point is it just

0:30:07 Sari: You know, especially like disability statistics and statistics about race can really betray whole populations in ways that have like really long lasting effects. Yeah, many things and lots of historians have looked into this and early historians were like, it was a conspiracy. I think it may be, it does not appear to have been a conspiracy. Instead, it appears that statistics were kind of a new thing. They didn't really maybe know how this is Patricia Cline Cohen has this great chapter where she's like, I think they just didn't know that much about math. That's part of it. But also part of It is that the forms were kind of messed up. So like, people maybe thought maybe you could think about the butterfly ballot as another example of where people thought they were checking one box, but in fact,

0:30:21 Thomas: Just if you said there are 12 black deaf people and no black people what's going on right some mistakes were made oh boy well some things haven't changed because I feel like that

0:30:59 Sari: They were checking another box um so that was part of the problem and then there you know in terms of the sort of like tabulation might have happened it also seems to have also happened maybe in that step as well so a number of things happened at once that produced what seemed like a clear pattern but in fact was like totally false mistakes were made and then people use those numbers for years and years afterwards yeah to think about the ways in which race and and disability were kind of deeply connected. Yeah. Yeah, especially when it sort of fits the

0:31:32 Thomas: Happens all the time still there'll be some obviously explainable number that you're like no and then it doesn't matter it'll be used the wrong way forever right

0:31:43 Sari: Story that somebody wants to tell. It's the 1840 census, there's a lot of debate about it. So yes, disability and race become increasingly linked. So much so I think, and this is this is a kind of paradoxical effect, but anti-slavery Black writers, especially in slave narratives, you get like Frederick Douglass saying, you know, he's going to show you how manly he is, There's an impulse to kind of show how not disabled you are. And so it's hard, it becomes harder to think about talking about blackness and disability together, and also, you know, fitness for citizenship. But still, there's lots of like weird examples of, you people arguing for disability and race together as conditions that people can have or embodied states that are still deserving of citizenship. And so part of what I'm interested in is actually just the unevenness of the past, right? Where it's like, we could tell a really neat story. And I think there is a story there about how the 1840 census really messed things up for a really long time, but was part of broader movements that were happening. But I'm also interested interested in the ways that still in the 1850s, 1860s, people are trying to think about imagining the world otherwise. And that's part of, I mean, I'm a literary scholar, so I'm interested especially in how popular American literature, important books that people think of, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, are showing us the kind of complexity of those worlds even after we think these shifts have already taken place.

0:31:45 Thomas: Right. Right. Well, because and we have to collapse everything down, especially people like me who aren't very good at history.

0:33:25 Thomas: But like if you told the history of now, I mean, it's not as though there's one thought on any of that stuff, you know.

0:33:31 Sari: Totally. Yeah. But it's very compelling to tell a story that's like, and then this moment,

0:33:31 Thomas: So I have to imagine there's a lot of regional difference and stuff, too.

0:33:38 Sari: Everything changed. And that's true and not true. Yeah, yeah. And like, sign language, again, I mean,

0:33:39 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it is important from the perspective of the federal government, I suppose, you know, like what kind of rights were, you know, started to be guaranteed and stuff. But yeah, I have to imagine the differences all over the country god that is wild yeah no oven mitts for

0:33:51 Sari: I, you know, just since you mentioned, you Know, your own biography is a great example of this, there's a huge campaign against sign language. Again, you don't want this kind of, I means, it lasts for a long time for decades. So you had these schools that were teaching sign language and And then suddenly they want deaf Americans instead to learn to read lips and to speak, which is called oralism. But you have all of these kids in deaf schools who are still signing. And they say, like, the superintendents are like, you know what? You can't stop them. Sign language just works better for them. And so even if you try to ban it, which is what happened, this is in the late 19th, early 20th century, you're not going to ban It. Well, you can ban it. But it's not going To work.

0:34:34 Thomas: Everyone oh my gosh oh wow oh wow even including sign language it wasn't just oh okay gotcha oh

0:34:35 Sari: Exactly. Exactly. But it continues to have these kind of racialized components. There's a horrible story of this guy in the early 20th century, who is accused of rape and castrated eventually. Yeah. And part of it is that he's deaf. And so there's this his name is Junius Wilson. And there's a great book on this, this horrible story. But part of what happens is that they sort of say that he can't speak. He doesn't have access to testimony to kind of defend himself or anything. Thing and he gets institutionalized for his whole life. But it's likely, and again, this isn't my conclusion, but that of Susan Burch and her collaborator, whose name I'm forgetting. But what they show is that what he probably spoke was something called Raleigh Sign, which is like a Black ASL. And because they were thinking that he needed to speak Northern white version of ASL, they just said he didn't speak and it ruins his life. Yes, that's right. That's right, right, that he did not have that he didn't speak sign language, right, that he Didn't know how to sign. But that seems not to be true. He just had a different kind.

0:35:36 Thomas: Wow sure it was like a different dialect of sign language oh wow geez the sign language thing is

0:35:41 Sari: And that's, again, the ways in which race and disability ended up collapsing. That's right. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, I happen to think that in both good and terrifying ways,

0:36:03 Thomas: Just nuts to me you look at something like that so people campaigning against sign language and And maybe this is all unanswerable, but I just wonder, is that just a massive coincidence of weird thoughts and people or is that inevitable? You know what I mean? Like, it's such a weird thought that people would be against that. Hmm.

0:36:27 Sari: There is a lot of accident in history. So actually, the use of sign language in the US to begin with as an accident. They wanted oralism. And I'll answer your question first and then and maybe they tell you a little bit about that story if you're interested. But I think that this sort of idea about inclusion and making deaf Americans, for example, citizens had a lot to do with reducing the visibility of disability. If you could train somebody who was deaf, for example, to speak and read lips, then they could just kind of be seamlessly a part of of they could pass and they could be integrated into american society and you wouldn't even have to know that they were deaf so there's a lot of this kind of universalizing impulse and we see it you know like if we just built the world differently we see this even in universal design even in the sort of like great contributions of disability advocacy to the world which is that like we just need like this one way of communicating and then or one way of sort of building the world And then disability no longer is this kind of impediment to participation. So I think some of the sort of impulse behind oralism was that, right? Like, well, if you just read lips and speak, then you can be part of society. And sign language is, and this is the words that they used at the time, this kind of arbitrary system. And we don't want to bring back an arbitrary system that's going to create this kind of group of people that speaks this foreign language. So the reason why sign language, though, is taken up as the way to educate deaf Americans in the sort of early 19th century, is that the British were the people who, and the family's name is Braidwood, they were the sort of like proprietors of the oralist teaching technologies. And they really wanted to do it themselves and make money in the US. So Gallaudet, who becomes the first director of the first school

0:38:19 Thomas: Sorry, negotiate with who?

0:38:22 Sari: For deaf Americans in the U.S., he goes and he tries to kind of negotiate with them. And he tries to bring oralism back to the U S and they just want it all for themselves. So it doesn't work. The Braidwoods, this British family who has developed this oralist teaching system. So he goes, he really tries to convince them to help him bring oralism back to us. It fails. And then then he's like, all right, I got to go to France. And Americans have this weird relationship to France, especially after the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. So it's like really pretty uncomfortable. And they're Catholics, like, it's pretty uncomfortable, he's Protestant, he's, you know, so he's pretty uncomfortable about going to learn this kind of like Catholic French system and bring it back. But the British oralists are saying, you Know, they don't want to have anything to do with him. So he goes, and he writes back to his benefactors. And he's like, all right, I'm only going to bring back as much as I think is useful. But what becomes American Sign Language originates in Paris. And it originates with this kind of French system that had been developed in the late 18th century. And that's what Gallaudet brings back. So the fact that sign language is the mode of instruction is itself a kind of historical accident that has to do with like, what amount to some like pretty greedy and inept Brits, who like, just to be

0:39:42 Sari: Honest, who don't make a go of it in the US, but imagine that they will, and thus keep oralism

0:39:42 Thomas: Oh, like they never even were going to.

0:39:49 Sari: From Americans. Well, they came and they did a bad job of it. So it doesn't get off the ground.

0:39:54 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. No, but yeah, but very contingent, very not. Yeah. Didn't, didn't. Yeah, that's

0:39:56 Sari: It's like a long, you don't need all the details of the story, but like, very contingent. Yeah.

0:40:03 Thomas: Interesting. I love that. Yeah yeah. Yeah but the fight against it is just so weird. I still,

0:40:05 Sari: And again, this historical accident, it didn't have to be that way. But that's the way that it happened. Yeah. Yeah, well, they do. I mean, you know, there is deaf culture, it is distinct,

0:40:12 Thomas: I still can't wrap my mind around that. Like I said, I've talked about it on the show before and it's, it's like crazy. Like why do people always get so worked up about, like it's just so weird is this idea that that would be like a threat and there's going to be conspiracies of deaf signing people that are going to be some threat to alexander graham bell I don't know the whole thing it's amazing right yeah it's like an acknowledgement or for them it's

0:40:37 Sari: And it's, you're celebrating, I think, but some people find that threatening. Exactly. American culture. Mm hmm. Exactly. Well, the aspiration is, and I think the thing

0:40:44 Thomas: Like there's only one culture for these people that think this there can only be yeah this mainstream white culture probably and anything else is a threat to that well okay honestly it's hard to wrap my mind around like that state of mind I didn't think about because in my mind it's a million subcultures you know but I'm guessing maybe these people weren't is open to that idea. Right. What? Oh, oh, wow. I had no idea about this. I didn't know that was

0:41:06 Sari: To remember here is that at the beginning, well I mean you're talking about the late 19th century reaction, but early on in the late 18th century, the thing that joins the people who live and what become the United States together more than anything is that they're British. So they don't have a lot in common. The history of the States is quite different. And so they're seeking to create a unified culture. And that unified culture is what's going to keep the nation together. And that's part of why Noah Webster like spells things differently. And he's like, this is the American way to spell stuff. And yeah. Oh yes. Yeah. Noah Webster created different ways of spelling things. That's why we spell things differently than British people. And it was supposed to be more logical, right? English is a weird language, but we're going to make it much more direct. Yeah, because we're Americans. We have good common sense. It is intentional.

0:41:58 Thomas: Intentional. Oh, wow, I thought that was just an evolutionary thing, kind of like a, wow that's so funny. Right, right, wow I suppose we're running low on time but I imagine there's a lot more to

0:42:00 Sari: Totally. No. So this is all part of it, right. It's like, all right, we're gonna create this unified American culture. And how do we bring people because the truth is, it's not just people with disabilities that have different bodies and minds. We all have different bodies and minds. So once you start saying sovereignty rests with this heterogeneous people, then you have to say, OK, how are we going to imagine something that's unifying to all these people who, in fact, are quite different from each other?

0:42:33 Thomas: The story about black citizenship and the intersection there with disability. Is there Is there else maybe in the last bit of it here that you want to tell the listeners? Excellent. Well,

0:42:42 Sari: I mean, I think one thing that's really neat is these spaces where you see, even in the 1850s or late 1860s, it's especially Black women. So people, Black disabled women, people who are kind of triply stigmatized, who are imagining these kind of like really new, interesting versions of citizenship and what the nation owes to them. And so the story kind of ends, at least the sort of historical part of the story, kind of ends with that. Like, all right, look at all these like cool ways that people imagine citizenship in a wide variety of ways, and especially people who are the most disenfranchised, you know, what are they seeing as like the kind of possibilities of American citizenship? And imagined so expansively, like at a moment where they were increasingly stigmatized, seems to me a kind of hopeful message for all of us, which is that there are these moments in the past that really are resources for us in the present. And it's important to kind of look to history to see those kinds of varieties and possibilities as we think about, you know, the way that we want the relationship between American citizenship, race and disability to look today? Uh, you know, no, I think I think we covered most of it was a delight. Sure. So there's

0:43:56 Thomas: Again, I can't believe the time's flown by. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't? Is there something that I want to make sure to get in? Well, excellent. The book is Before Disability, A History of American Citizenship. Thanks so much for coming on. Anywhere you want point people to find more of your work besides the book, of course.

0:44:17 Sari: The book, but also, I curated a online exhibit that people can go to with my colleague, David Weimer. It's called Touch This Page and making sense of the ways we read. So, there is a story I didn't talk about at all about technologies for blind reading. Americans don't really use Braille as the sort of like dominant mode of reading for 100 years, but they have all these other kind of neat histories of, yeah.

0:44:37 Thomas: Oh, wow. That's really cool. Well thank you so much, Professor Sari Altshuler, Before Disability

0:44:39 Sari: So if you want to think more about like the various senses that you use to read, you can print 3D examples of that 19th century print if you have a 3D printer or have a makerspace or something. So that's at touchthispage.com if you kind of want a hands-on place to look for some of the objects that the book talks about. Thanks to you.

0:45:04 Thomas: A History of American Citizenship. Looking forward to reading the book and thanks for joining us. On with myths for everyone.

0:45:09 Sari: Really appreciate it.