Measuring disadvantage: A well-intentioned concept gone horribly wrong

A few days ago, a blind woman with a white cane and a guide dog ordered a taxi in the city close to where I live. When the taxi arrived she got into the back and her guide dog was about to get in as well, but the taxi driver insisted that the dog was not allowed in his vehicle, despite national laws that bar discrimination against licensed guide dogs and their owners.

The woman argued with the driver and insisted that she had already paid for the taxi through her mobile app. The driver first shut the door, separating her from the guide dog and insisted that she would either go without her guide dog or she would lose the price of her fare because he would report that she hadn’t shown up.

The woman protested and the driver ordered her out of the cab and threatened to call the police.

The woman then began to voice-dial the police herself, due to the driver’s threatening tone and her knowledge of the law. The driver attempted to grab her phone. Then, cursing her with profanity, according to a witness, he opened the door and violently dragged the woman out of the vehicle. The witness’s video shows the woman roughly hauled from the taxi, so that she fell and was left lying in the open roadway where vehicles passed as the taxi drove away from the scene.

At the last second, the driver tossed the woman’s white cane out of a window and onto the road. In the video, the woman is seen slowly getting to her feet. Despite the presence of moving cars and a major hotel, the only person who came to her aid was the witness with the phone who had to run down several flights of stairs to reach her.

I haven’t been on social media much in the past six months. I used to try to keep up with Facebook for the connections to old friends and for the ostensible positive effect on marketing books.

But first activism and then family crisis interfered until I found myself popping onto Facebook only every week or so, to go through notifications and then get off. I used to get pretty worked up about some of the hideous things on social media, and now it is more like an intellectual dismay over the state of the world. I rarely have the impulse to get into a big argument or defend my position on social media these days.

Today for the first time in many months I commented on a post that got under my skin. And it wasn’t even about that incident with the woman and the taxi driver, which painfully reminds me of a time a few years ago when I was physically assaulted and threatened with police while asking a driver illegally parked across a sidewalk to either move or assist me because I couldn’t step out into traffic with my two toddlers to get around his vehicle, given that I can’t see.

The post that got at me this time was worse than just a single incident. I ended up doing some extra research and found my stomach boiling with frustration and even anger. And no, it wasn’t Trump supporters, neo-Nazis out to get my brown kids or white supremacists parasiting off of my spiritual symbols either (though those are things that have lit a fire in me in the past).

No. This time it is allies, just allies being knee-jerk and thoughtless in a way that leaves me sick with sadness.

Creative Commons image by Oregon Department of Transportation

The post was an online tool for measuring the intersectionality of oppression, called the Intersectionality Score. The theory of intersectionality is one I am well acquainted with and I’m not even particularly adverse to attempts to roughly measure it the way this tool does. It is a reasonably effective way to portray intersectionality both visually and kinesthetically and to allow people who may not have a lot of life experience with the issues to understand the interplay of factors in oppression and marginalization.

I guess the thing that really gets to me is when something reasonable and hopeful is finally done, but done so badly that it perpetuates harm.

Most progressive people who understand intersectionality have always insisted that it cannot be measured and that privilege cannot be compared. We don’t have any objective way of knowing if a Black person in Detroit faces more barriers than a disabled person in a small town in Nevada or visa versa, and most attempts to make a direct comparison are rightly shot down. But this Intersectionality Score tool makes an attempt to do just that, though it makes no vehement claims to accuracy.

But whether it claims accuracy or not, it does reflect the common attitudes of most woke progressive folks and for the past several months those attitudes have been one of the factors driving me away from social media and activism.

The Intersectionality Score tool isn’t the problem, only a symptom of attitudes that I have seen widespread and possibly increasing in recent years.

You see, the tool weights the various factors involved in marginalization—disability, economic class, gender, migration status, native language, race, sexual orientation and so forth (consciously listed alphabetically by me, not by them)—and you get a score based on where you fall on separate spectrums of each of these categories. It is reasonably complex and the fact that there are spectrums—rather than on/off switches—reflects an attempt at nuance and accuracy.

Most of the weighting is reasonable—judging from statistics of discrimination, hate crimes and life expectancy of various groups as well as broad experience of individuals known to me—with one glaring exception.

Perceived racial identity is the factor weighted heaviest, due to widespread discrimination, racist attitudes, police violence, social marginalization and a host of other pervasive adversities. Gender is given a bit more weight than sexual orientation and gender identity, probably because of wage inequality, endemic sexual harassment, domestic violence, social dismissal and other problems faced by women on a daily basis. Sexual orientation and gender identity do get more weight than say economic class, which could be debated, though given the number of fatal hate crimes against gay, lesbian and trans folks, a case can be made.

But the one factor that stands out as being dismissed and belittled in the Intersectionality Score tool is disability.

One can determine the weight given to any specific factor by leaving all other sliders neutral and sliding the bar for one factor all the way to each extreme. Out of 100 points, race is weighted at 27 points. That means that if you have a completely and utterly white person steeped in white culture and a completely and utterly black person steeped in black culture, but in all other respects they are somehow miraculously average, the black person is apparently disadvantaged in our society by 27 out of 100 points.

I am definitely on the far white end of that scale myself, but after years of study and watching my children who are not white grow up in a racist society, I have to conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the difference white privilege makes.

Gender is given a weight of 15 points, which again seems reasonable though conservative, to me as a woman, though I encounter irritating micro-aggressions daily and humiliation every now and then due to my gender. Sexual orientation is given 10 points, which I can imagine may well be justified.

But disability, even the most severe types of disability, is given just seven points out of a hundred.

Don’t get me wrong. I can imagine how a person without a disability, who has not researched the issue or had any significant experience with disabilities might think that although having a disability disadvantages a person because they actually lack some crucial abilities that isn’t what the Intersectionality Score is measuring. The uninformed able-bodied person can easily think that most of the issues concerning disability are unavoidable physical, neurological or biochemical problems, rather than socially constructed barriers, and thus not covered by the concept of intersectionality.

The problem is that this understandable able-bodied person would be wrong. And an uninformed person has no business designing and putting out a tool like this in public with links to major initiatives like Teaching Tolerance, while dismissing the social exclusion faced by people with disabilities as less than half as impactful as modern gender discrimination, for instance.

On any average day, the physical trouble being blind and somewhat mobility impaired causes me is a nuisance, something to be taken into account and worked around. The social impact, however, is overwhelming and has shaped my entire life from employment to social circles, from physical and intense psychological assaults to the necessity of emigrating to another country to achieve a basic level of freedom. Dealing with patriarchy as a woman is a pain and sometimes dangerous, but it doesn’t even come close to the impact of oppression and marginalization due to disability. And my disability is far from the most marginalizing possible.

It is hard to imagine that the designers of the Intersectionality Score tool were entirely uninformed about this. Here are some basic statistics that can be found with a 10 minute Google search:

• 47 percent of people with disabilities live in poverty.

• Internationally 90 percent of children who have a disability still don’t attend school today.

• People with disabilities are 70 percent more likely to be the victim of a violent crime.

• A third of all employers openly state that they do not hire people with disabilities because they assume people with disabilities cannot perform required job tasks, regardless of their track record.

• Only 35 percent of people with a disability, who are of age and able to work, actually have a job. About 80 percent of non-disabled individuals, in comparison, have a job.

• 6 percent of women with a disability in the UK have been forcibly sterilized.

• Only 45 countries in the world today have anti-discrimination laws that aim to protect people with disabilities.

• A quarter of people with disabilities face at least one incident of discrimination every single day.

• 40 percent of people with a disability in the UK encounter discrimination or socially constructed barriers when accessing basic goods and services like grocery shopping, medical services, housing and education.

• 38 percent of able-bodied people admit to pollsters that they believe anyone with a disability is a burden on society.

• 28 percentage of able-bodied people say they resent any extra attention that someone with a disability receives.

• Nearly 70 percent of able-bodied people say they actively avoid people with disabilities in social situations out of discomfort or irritation.

• Official estimates say that in the UK alone over 100 hate crimes are committed against individuals with disabilities every single day. An OSCE report states that hate crimes against people with disabilities, including assaults with more than one attacker, are critically under-reported, widespread and continuous, although they are much less discussed, studied or recognized by police than hate crimes based on race or religion.

• The FBI reported that serious hate crimes of national interest against people with disabilities rose by 70 percent between 2016 and 2017 and mentioned that hate crimes against people with disabilities are still vastly under-reported.

• The Harvard Implicit Association Test shows that out of a sample of more than 300,000 people, including people with disabilities themselves, nearly 80 percent of those who voluntarily took a psychological test have an automatic, if often subconscious, preference for able-bodied people over people with disabilities.

The designers of the Intersectionality Score tool might well argue that these problems are primarily about people with “severe disabilities” only. However, their tool uses a slider precisely for this reason. Only at the far end of the scale is an individual considered completely able bodied and without disability. And yet, their assumption is that the most extreme end of the disability scale implies only very minor social marginalization.

The designers of the tool may also be assuming that severe disabilities are rare. Again, it is a wrong assumption arrived at precisely because people with significant disabilities are so marginalized in society that they are often not present where able-bodied people are present. Nineteen percent of the US population is categorized as having a disability, while ten percent qualify as having a severe disability.

The designers of this tool may also argue with my anecdote in the beginning of this post, saying that the problem the woman faced was not based on prejudice related to her disability but related to something (the guide dog) which is only an accessory to the disability. Yet these same woke progressives have no trouble dissecting this same logic when police officers insist they shot a young black teen because he was wearing a hoodie, not because he was black, or when an employer insists he was not discriminating against a black woman in hiring but objecting to her “unprofessional” hairstyle.

I am going to mention here another possible explanation for the way the Intersectionality Score tool is designed, because it is inevitable that the argument will be used. Some will say that people with minor disabilities or health issues (peanut allergies are specifically belittled as insignificant on the site) will inevitably rank themselves as having a severe disability. The designers of the tool may claim this is the reason for the low weight given to the whole issue of disability.

The problem here is inherent to the attitudes toward people with disabilities. The designers of the Intersectionality Score tool trust people of color to rate their level of color versus whiteness. They trust the honesty of LGBTQ+ people to rate their own experience. But they don’t trust people with disabilities to be intelligent, fair-minded and understanding of nuance. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Disability is the least studied and the least mentioned marginalization factor among progressives and the general population alike. Often as not, diversity lists that insist on inclusion of people regardless of race, gender and so forth, don’t include disability or include it only under “other” categories.

Until recently, even I believed prejudice against people with disabilities was minor compared to other types of prejudice. I assumed this was an established fact because of the way my woke friends and colleagues only tacked it on at the end if at all when discussing prejudice or oppression. I believed it was minor, despite living through it personally day after day, personally experiencing hate-based assaults, hiring discrimination and community shunning.

I figured, along with most other woke progressives, that while people with disabilities experience some discrimination, people are much more likely to pity us than hate us. I assumed that my own experiences of hate and social marginalization in a wide variety of situations had as much to do with being a non-conformist as it did with having a disability.

That was until I encountered the Harvard Implicit Association Test. The results of this test are primarily offered only AFTER one has taken each test, so I have constructed bar graphs to show you the results more easily. The test is the same for each category. The respondent has to categorize images and words at high speed, depending on specific instructions given.

The test goes too fast to consciously manipulate. If you try, you will simply get a result saying your test couldn’t be processed or you made too many mistakes. But if you just do your best and have a minutely harder time categorizing one group of people with positive terms, the test will score you as being subconsciously biased against that group.

You might think that these split-second differences would be pretty random, but when distributed over hundreds of thousands of test respondents, they aren’t. The results show us what we already know about prejudice based on race and sexual orientation. There is a lot of bias out there, even among those who consciously want to be unbiased and anti-racist.

The Implicit Association Test doesn’t necessarily mean that a given individual will discriminate or even agree with their own test results. The official website of the Harvard Implicit Association Test states that, “While a single IAT is unlikely to be a good predictor of a single person’s behavior at a single time point, across many people the IAT does predict behavior in areas such as discrimination in hiring and promotion, medical treatment, and decisions related to criminal justice.”

That is to say that while you can’t take someone’s test score and know whether or not they will discriminate personally tomorrow, if a group has high scores of implicit bias against another group, discrimination and prejudice will rise accordingly. Groups that demonstrate higher implicit bias discriminate more and behave in more prejudiced ways over all. Groups that are less preferred in the test, experience more discrimination and social marginalization.

And as the charts of results show, 68 percent of respondents, representing more than 800,000 tests between 2004 and 2015, demonstrated an automatic preference for light skin over dark skin. The results are nearly identical on a similar test featuring photographs of European Americans versus African Americans, which was taken by over 3 million people. The test results are anything but random.

While around eighteen percent of people were neutral when it came to both race and sexual orientation questions, the bias was somewhat less on sexual orientation. For some of us, this is surprising information. If you grew up in a conservative Christian area, like I did, you get the impression that racism may exist but it is repressed, while homophobia is often loud and proud. But that loudness is confined to its homophobic specific group. Among those with anti-gay bias, there is a significant block—about 40 percent—where that bias is severe.

The same goes for bias against people with disabilities though, only more so. Of the 78 percent of people, who demonstrated bias against people with disabilities, half showed severe bias. The severe bias group here is larger and more extreme. The types of words associated with this negative bias against people with disabilities are not merely about pity or dismissal, but rather terms like “hatred,” “dishonest,” “ugly,” “terrible,” “poison,” “annoying,” and “disgust.”

I am left with this striking discrepancy. While the Harvard study, which is based on a scientific and measurable indicator, shows that people with disabilities face significantly greater potential prejudice and negative bias in society even than people of color, the tool designed by woke, progressive allies dismisses disability as a significant factor in the intersectionality of oppression and social marginalization.

It is difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion that the negative bias against people with disabilities discovered in the more objective Harvard study played a role in the design of the Intersectionality Score tool, and it continues to play a role in progressive and activist communities, which we have looked to as our best and only hope for equity and inclusion.

My experiences in progressive and activist organizations—too often being silenced and marginalized over ostensibly “interpersonal” problems with people I actually had no quarrel with—begin to take on new connotations.

Though I doubt the designers of the Intersectionality Score tool set out to perpetuate harmful dismissive and belittling attitudes toward people with disabilities in progressive communities, their site has that effect. Comments and responses on the site don’t appear to be up-to-date, so it is unlikely that they will listen, but I hope at least this one site will be changed to better reflect the realities we live with.

In the end, after getting it all down in words, I find that the burning anger, which aggravating social media posts so often kindle, has cooled. I’m left instead with aching grief and dread of a world in which my child, who is vulnerable both in terms of race/ethnicity and disability, has few true allies indeed.