Journalist – Historian – Speaker
In case you missed it, the correlation between mental illness and violence towards others is not in evidence. The belief that the mentally ill are more likely to take part in a mass shooting appears to be a misleading. There were 198,760 homicides committed by a firearm in the United States between 1999 and 2015, …
Last week I wrote a column for Pacific Standard on the Gerber Baby. He has Down syndrome. Yay! Now what? I wrote: I contacted Gerber to find out more about their commitment to disability rights. Initially, Business Insider reported on parents who complained that Gerber Life, the baby food company’s sister affiliate, was refusing to provide …
Don’t miss this story about policing and disability from Chattanooga. It’s a perfectly awful example of the #cultofcompliance. Hardaway, the victim here, is black, disabled, and homeless. First encounter: Weeks before, Hardaway said his wheelchair had died nearby, leaving him stranded on the sidewalk for eight hours, with no one offering help. He eventually fell …
The President of Colorado State University shows how to respond when Nazis want a platform. The TWP goes by various names online, but let me keep this simple: a Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi. And the members of the Traditionalist Worker Party are unapologetic Nazis who advocate murdering all those who don’t align …
More on the cuteness porn front: If a company is going to slap a cute picture of a child with Down syndrome on a bottle, it’s fair to ask them how they plan to use the publicity and resulting profits to build a more inclusive company. If Down syndrome organizations and celebrities are going to …
The great Anne Helen Peterson, who made the leap from academia to journalism, has a great piece on bridging that divide in her weekly newsletter. On talking to journalists My advice to the group of academics, then, was two-fold. First: recognize that both sides need to be more flexible. Understand that journalists have to have …
“Concerned citizens” called police on a cute white autistic child with messy hair, concerned he was being abused by his parents. Police figured it out quickly, thankfully, and other forms of bias didn’t intervene to make the situation more dangerous (i.e. had the child not been white). Don’t do this. Then there’s this: Oh hey. …
New in Pacific Standard: Since the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution was signed in 1983, granting equal legal rights to fetuses and pregnant women, it has functioned as a total ban on legal abortion. Next May, Ireland will hold a referendum over whether to repeal the amendment, and current polling suggests that pro-repeal will …
This article on policing and autism does not quote a single autistic person. It does quote “Vicki Harvey, the community outreach coordinator with Autism Nova Scotia.” And cops. https://t.co/eQVU7lGZ3I — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 31, 2018 This is a story about policing and autism that quotes police and people who coordinate “outreach” for an …
Today at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto I will be giving a talk on Public Humanities in the Age of Trump. It’s been an intense period lately around right-wing attacks on academic freedom, not the least because I’ve encountered the worst sets of attacks of my career. They were exhausting, if …