Where Activism and Disability Collide
The violence of unreflective social justice
How many stories are there on a sidewalk?
Most of my friends are activists in one way or another. I guess if you think about the power of stories, I am as well. I’m a storyteller. However, there’s a difference between leading someone to a new perspective through story-telling and more hands-on approaches. I believe that one of the advantages to stories is that they give you time to process — usually without endangering other people around you.
This is my story of catching up to a popular “feminist” experiment and then rejecting it. More than that, it’s a reflection on how, in focusing too hard on our own problems, we can lose sight of the humanity of the people around us…and how when we act unreflectively (especially out of anger or self-righteousness), we can hurt those people.
About five years ago, in feminist circles and on Twitter, “sidewalk challenges” became quite popular. In sidewalk challenges, women put their bodies on the line to resist manslamming: the phenomenon of men banging into women who won’t get of their way. (Reports indicate that the intensity of manslamming varies based on time and geographic location…and whether or not you’re wearing heels.)
I’m not sure what rock I was living under at the time to miss this challenge. In any case, I was not initiated into the ways of resisting the sidewalk patriarchy until quite recently over drinks with friends. The experiment, it turns out, can also be expanded to challenge the dominance of white people on the sidewalk versus people of color. And a male friend confirmed further suspicions that men also have their own sub-code of who moves out of the way in the event of a man-on-manslam situation.
Basically, the sidewalk challenge is about awakening powerful people to the fact that they don’t own all the space. Who you focus on challenging depends on your own self-perceived position in the sidewalk power hierarchy.
So I gave it a try. In theory, it works like this: I, a woman, walk directly in my straight line along the sidewalk. Instead of dodging completely out of the way of oncoming men, I adjust about halfway, and expect them to likewise adjust about halfway. If they do, they’re cool. If they don’t, they’re oblivious participants in the capitalist white supremacist patriarchy…and me bumping into them will jolt them into enlightenment, galvanizing a worldwide feminist revolution. (OK, I might be exaggerating just a teensy bit.)
In reality, sidewalks are fluid sites of ever-changing power dynamics and environmental considerations and hazards. On crowded sidewalks, pedestrians are not only dodging each other but also cracked or broken pavement, people in wheelchairs or with baby strollers, teens focused entirely on their cell-phones, trashcans, dumpsters out for pickup, homeless people begging…you get the idea. And what you see on the sidewalk in terms of obstacles and your space to adjust to them is the flipped picture of what oncoming people see — so your assessment of the available space is in some ways quite subjective.
I also discovered that when people (including me!) engage in the sidewalk challenge, it looks a lot more like refusing to give even an inch …as opposed to a mutual and equal adjustment in space by two passing people. This is because adjustments on crowded sidewalks are often last minute, and it often only takes one person twisting their shoulder out of the way to accommodate the oncoming person. So in order to get manslammed, you frequently have to behave as a manslammer — i.e., making no type of adjustment for the oncoming person whatsoever. Obviously, there are exceptions to this, but it bears keeping in mind.
But my big epiphany about the sidewalk challenge actually came when some asshole slammed right into me extra hard. It hurt. And I was mad. And I said something like, “Hey!” (I also glared after his retreating back in a very intimidating manner, which didn’t really accomplish anything.)
But more than that, it occurred to me that if I had an invisible disability the collision could potentially have hurt me a lot more. So I got even more irritated.
And then, after a couple minutes, I realized something else: what if the asshole who just bumped into me had an invisible disability and I hurt him?
What if I’m the asshole?
After that, I took some time to actually think about the sidewalk challenge and unpack its key underlying assumptions. Those assumptions turned out to be pretty ableist (meaning based on the perspective of people without disabilities…a perspective that often assumes everyone around us does or should function in the world as we do).
First assumption? Well, first, there’s the step where I, a social justice activist, decide to put my body on the line by not moving out of a man’s way. This decision assumes I am healthy and strong enough to view this as a worthwhile enterprise: I probably won’t end up too much more damaged than I started out. People with injuries, severe chronic pain, and/or certain invisible disabilities are typically highly motivated to avoid worsening their condition through bodily impact. Now, everyone participates in different protests against injustice to varying degrees. So with this issue alone, maybe the challenge is still OK. However, this issue gestures at additional problems.
Importantly, when I decide to hold my own line (not move out of an oncoming pedestrian’s way) while walking, I am making big assumptions about the people around me. I’m assuming the person I’m running into (or letting run into me, we’ll get to this distinction in a minute) has the cognitive and physical ability to:
1) see that they can’t hold their own line without running into me,
2) process this information, and
3) respond by making the necessary adjustments.
So what about seeing me and processing my approach? There are multiple conditions can that affect cognitive function. These can be linked to or separate from difficulties then executing certain physical maneuvers. Such conditions include, but aren’t limited to, severe anxiety and/or depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, intellectual disabilities, PTSD, multiple sclerosis, and independent sensory processing issues. (These conditions often do not bend to willpower, nor to an individual’s genuine desire to share sidewalk space equitably.)
Maybe I avoid bumping into people who “look” disabled. But this is not enough. Depending on severity, many disabilities are entirely invisible to the average passerby. In fact, according to Laura Kiesel, many people with disabilities present to the outside world as being so healthy that even their doctors (with access to their actual MRIs and other scans) don’t take them seriously. Knowing this, is my two-second sidewalk take really going to be a reliable assessment?
I have a friend, for example, who has fibromyalgia — a condition characterized by widespread pain and other symptoms. She looks totally “normal.” She told me she’s considerate and aware in public places, partly out of a concern for social justice, but also out of a self-interested desire to avoid people running into her. However, one aspect of fibromyalgia is known as a “fibro fog.” When caught in a fibro fog, some people lose a great deal of situational awareness. For instance, they might walk into a room and forget what they went in for; or they might step out onto a sidewalk and then forget to keep walking for a minute — temporarily blocking someone else’s path.
My friend with fibromyalgia is married, and when she’s caught in a fibro fog, she can usually send her husband out to the store instead of going herself. She expressed concern for people who don’t have that option, noting that the effects of a fibro fog might lead a passerby to think the sufferer was being inconsiderate: “People with disabilities can’t just stay home in case non-disabled people think we’re being assholes or sexist or racist or classist or whatever. We don’t have that choice, and even if we did, it’s crap.”
What about step 3 (making physical adjustments to share space with others)? Conditions could that limit the ability to make rapid physical adjustments to available space include some of the conditions listed above, plus cerebral palsy, the use of certain prosthetics (including the use of prosthetic legs), Parkinson’s disease, and traumatic brain injuries. Importantly, just because a person seems to be keeping pace with others and walking in a fairly straight line does not mean they have the capacity to execute last-minute maneuvers.
This is where the distinction I mentioned earlier between “letting a privileged person run into me” and “running into a person [that I perceive as more privileged]” breaks down.
I’m not placing the onus on the trampled people of the world to get out of the way of people doing the trampling. Instead, I’m suggesting that maybe me being figuratively trampled by the world in some aspects of my life doesn’t mean I deserve priority on a sidewalk where there might be people at risk of being literally trampled. If I can move out of the way, I should.
Because here’s the thing: many people at risk of being trampled are not easily identifiable. They blend in. Like secret agents.
These people may look more privileged than me. In fact, in every way other than operating within sidewalk space, these people may actually be more privileged than me. What then? Don’t I deserve a little sidewalk respect in honor of all the crap I put up with?
Put differently, you could argue that even if a white man has a disability, we should be focusing on his responsibility to share space with someone broadly less privileged than him. Or you could argue that you’re engaging in the sidewalk challenge to stand up for even less privileged people — the marginalized of the marginalized, as it were.
As I’ve already noted, however, disabilities don’t magically bend to willpower. Whether or not that man theoretically should make space for me on the sidewalk is entirely unrelated to his ability to do so. Further, we don’t get to exploit our power over someone more vulnerable than us in the name of advocacy. Abuse of privilege is not an acceptable way to fight oppression.
As for the argument we could make about only being concerned with the “marginalized of the marginalized”, this sounds suspiciously like a game of “Oppression Olympics” (competing for the title of “most oppressed”). The feminist theory of intersectionality explains why this is a bad idea. Intersectionality recognizes that some people experience many types of oppression while others experience relatively few, but it rejects an additive approach to oppression.
Alex Lange explains the additive approach: “For instance, someone who is White (+1), is middle-aged (+1), Christian (+1), a cisgender (+1) man (+1), with generalized anxiety (-1), who is queer (-1), and poor (-1) has a Privilege Score of +5. Talking about privilege, power, and oppression becomes a plus or minus concept. We all begin to size one another up and discuss who has “uber” privilege points and who does not. And yet, this is not how oppression, let alone intersectionality, works.”
(Even accepting Oppression Olympics logic, all we have to do is imagine that a hypothetical “white male” I intentionally collide with is actually a closeted transwoman with a speech impediment, bipolar disorder, bad health coverage, and multiple repetitive strain injuries from minimum wage jobs. She tries to adjust to my approach but the exhaustion from working three jobs exacerbates the side effects of her medication; the meds slow her cognitive processing and also her physical reflexes. The collision itself, which barely makes me flinch, causes her a terrible pain due to her chronic neck problems. If you’re keeping score, I’m no longer winning the competition for most oppressed.)
An Oppression Olympics approach is problematic for a lot of reasons, but especially because it gives us a sense of self-righteousness when judging other people…people about whom we know absolutely nothing.
In addition, Hankivsky explains that, “from an intersectional perspective, power is relational. A person can simultaneously experience both power and oppression in varying contexts, at varying times.”
Basically, different privileges and disadvantages matter differently at different times and in different places. On a busy sidewalk, the ability to get where you’re going in a reasonable amount of time and relatively unscathed is a privilege. (Even if you have to literally dodge the patriarchy in the process.) Don’t believe me? Ask any person of color subjected to stop-and-frisk; ask a wheelchair user who can’t even get onto the sidewalk in the first place because it has no curb cuts; or ask that dude with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome whose shoulder I just dislocated in the name of the revolution.
Public spaces like sidewalks are political. All sorts of power dynamics are at play, but this is not an excuse to reinforce dynamics based on actual physical power.
Which brings us to a bonus unexamined assumption underpinning the sidewalk challenge: it’s all fair game, because no one is going to end up seriously hurt. After all, not many of my friends engaging in this challenge would outright punch a random stranger for social justice. And probably none of us would be OK with stabbing someone for a “feminist experiment.” (Not even a quick, shallow stab. No matter how much we wanted to.)
But the reality is that for someone with a chronic pain condition, a hard enough bump could cause a terrible flare up. Someone on prosthetic legs might fall over and have difficulty getting back up. Someone with brittle bone disease might end up with a fracture.
There are also psychological disorders that could make a sidewalk collision much more traumatic for someone else than you would expect. When I asked a friend with PTSD what he thought about the sidewalk challenge, he told me about one Christmas Eve where he experienced an embodied flashback and didn’t wake up until he was standing in the liquor aisle of a grocery store.
“People probably bumped into me on the way there, I probably bumped into people. I don’t remember. What I do remember is eventually realizing I was standing in the middle of that aisle. Like, right in the middle, like a jerk. And, no one bumped me or gave me a hard time in that moment.” He paused. “I’m lucky they didn’t. As you’re coming out of a flashback you’re incredibly vulnerable. I might have collapsed. I’m guessing most of the reason no one bothered me is because I’m a white male, pretty imposing-looking. But I hope that kindness can be extended to other people, too.”
Ideally, the sidewalk challenge is about awakening powerful people to the fact that they don’t own all the space. Ideally, the sidewalk challenge creates space for the less privileged. But there’s a problem: we can’t always tell who the “less privileged” are in any given situation.
And this specific problem is illustrative of a bigger problem: people without disabilities tend to forget about the issues faced by people with disabilities…
…just like a lot of men tend to forget about crap women have to deal with, and white people tend to forget about challenges faced by people of color, and straight people tend to forget about discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and the list goes on.
In follow up conversations with my drinks crowd, I discovered that one of my friends has been engaging in the sidewalk challenge since 2014. So we talked through some of these issues. At first she was resistant, but soon she was horrified.
“Do you think I really could have hurt someone?” she asked. Her question acknowledged that there is a difference in intent between an accidental, last-minute collision and a collision you see coming and let happen (especially if the other person doesn’t realize it will happen or can’t avoid it).
Sadly, it’s entirely possible she did hurt someone. Some invisible disabilities and chronic illnesses are very rare, but some are surprisingly common.
It’s never fun to realize that something you considered revolutionary or a force for good is actually reinforcing a harmful power structure. But it’s not too late to recognize the flaws in the sidewalk challenge and try alternative methods of challenging existing power dynamics.
What if, instead of trying to take the sidewalk by force, we encouraged each other to be more aware and more considerate? To spend time reflecting on historical and contemporary power structures and how they affect the manner in which we relate to each other…and to strangers we pass on our daily commute?
Start a conversation with your friends and family (not just the men) about how they walk, who they see, how they react to oncoming pedestrians. Conversations are messy and people can get defensive if they think you’re accusing them of being a jerk. But you can have a lot more impact persuading the men in your life to share space than you’ll have pissing off strangers by running into them.
Next time you’re on a sidewalk and it looks like someone’s about to plow right through you, consider saying “Hi!” to that person. Or, if you can, just make space for them. Instead of focusing on the space we believe we deserve, let’s take up the space we actually need.
In short, I’m proposing a New Sidewalk Challenge: make an effort to move lovingly in the world. Be aware of your surroundings and the people around you.
This was my sidewalk story. What do you want yours to be?
