Just Below the Line: Disability, Housing, and Equity in the South

3. Defining Equality

The most interesting aspect of a society’s world view is that its individual adherents are . . . unconscious of how it affects the way . . . they perceive the reality around them. A world view is successful to the extent that it is so internalized . . . that it goes unquestioned. —JEREMY RIFKIN, Entropy: A New World View Ensuring equality, presumably, is among the highest missions of democracy in the United States. As the disability scholar Douglas Baynton states, “Since the social and political revolutions of the eighteenth century, the trend in western political thought has been to refuse to take for granted inequalities between persons or groups.”1 Nevertheless, as the population of America has grown more diverse—economically, ethnically, religiously, and in age— ensuring equality has become an evermore difficult task. A series of questions have emerged: What demographic factor carries the most weight—race, gender, class, geographic location, age, (dis)ability, education? Which factors are most likely to foster increased social advantages? Inversely, which facets are likely to lead to discrimination and oppression? Amy Petersen, a special education professor at the University of Northern Iowa, tackles these questions in an extensive set of interviews with Krissy, a black female college student with a learning disability.2 What affects college life and socialization most: being black, being female, or having a learning disability? The case of Krissy illustrates both the similarities and the divergences of gender, race, and disability identity development. Krissy’s remarks also illustrate the struggles of social acceptance and of self-acceptance. Like Cross’s second stage of Nigrescence, where black identity is called into question and often viewed to be 49 Defining Equality KORYDON H. SMITH 3 a liability, Krissy questions her race and gender, and sees disability as a negative label. She embraces Afro-centrism, but resists disability classification, especially detesting the physical and socioacademic space that articulates it, the “resource room”: It [high school] was horrible, there were no black boys; so of course, when one came we all fought over him. We were like oh, he’s so cute, but then we found out he was in resource and then he wasn’t cute anymore. We were so mad to find out. We finally get a black boy and he turns out to be in resource. He was dumb after all . . . So I didn’t like being in there . . . I didn’t want to be in resource . . . When I turned 18, I signed myself out.3 One of the most well-known theories of Nigrescence, the process of African American identity development, is attributed to William Cross. According to Cross, the development of black identity contains five sequential stages, moving from a lack of awareness, through stages of heightened awareness, toward selfrespect and activism.4 Cross’s work in the area of race identity is paralleled in gender studies by the work of Ruthellen Josselson, among others. Rather than “stages” of development, Josselson defined four identity “types” in women, each with varying degrees of self-realization and self-confidence and diverse views toward familial relationships.5 Analogous theories of identity development can be found regarding gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identity, but there is less cohesion regarding theories of identity development among persons with disabilities. Much of the scholarship in this area has borrowed from the literature on sexuality.6 One cause is the relative newness of disability studies disciplines. A second cause is the diversity found among the category “disabled,” including persons with visual or hearing impairments, learning or cognitive disabilities, mobility impairments, and so on. As one might expect, the personal experiences of deafness, depression, or impaired mobility, for instance, like the personal experiences of upper-class versus lower-class blacks, or rural versus urban homosexuals, likely vary a great deal. So, the debate continues about the benefits and drawbacks of specialized education, employment, housing, and services. How is identity development fostered or hindered? How is equality cultivated or subdued by the way education and housing are designed? In any case, it is clear that design plays a central role in socialization, identity development, and perceptions 50 DEFINING EQUALITY of equality. This chapter explores these questions—paying special focus to the interrelationships and trajectories of federal legislation , architectural regulations, and cultural values—in an attempt to reveal the influence that changing social mores have on housing production in Arkansas, the South, and throughout the United States. In 1890 Louisiana passed the Separate...