Benign Discrimination

Benign Discrimination

The Naked Truth about

Benign Discrimination

by Michael Baillif

From the Editor: Michael Baillif is an attorney

working in New York City. Until recently he lived and worked in the nation's capital,

where anything can happen and eventually will. In the following article he reflects on the

significance of one of the more bizarre incidents to occur recently on the diplomatic

scene.

This is what he says:

Have you ever had a dream in which you found

yourself in public and, to your horror, realized that you didn't have on any clothes?

Believe it or not, a variation of this nightmare actually happened to a man in Washington,

D.C., early last summer.

In June the President of South Korea came to

Washington to meet with President Clinton. Among other festivities a state dinner was held

to celebrate the occasion. As the guests walked through a receiving line shaking hands

with President Clinton, the unthinkable happened. One of the attendees, a renowned video

artist, who also happened to be disabled, stood up from his wheelchair and, with the help

of a walker, approached President Clinton for a handshake. As he extended his hand, the

man's pants somehow became unfastened and fell down around his ankles. To make matters

worse for both the man and those in the audience, he wasn't wearing any underwear!

The next day the poor man's disaster was greeted

with howls of laughter on news shows and talk radio programs across the country. After

all, the image of someone's pants falling down as he greets the President is something

right out of a Marx Brothers movie. Significantly, however, the laughter evoked by this

incident choked in the throats of many when they learned that the man was disabled. MSNBC,

for instance, refused to air the report of the mishap, describing it as "an

unfortunate incident with a handicapped gentleman."

This unwillingness to join in the merriment,

however, revealed a second naked truth, this time about the nature of benign

discrimination. With the best of intentions some in the media denied the man the most

basic aspect of equality: the right to be laughed at when one is at the center of an

absurd situation. As Jane Austen so eloquently phrased it in Pride and Prejudice,

"For what do we live but to be made sport of by our neighbors and to laugh at them in

our turn?"

Where a potentially humorous situation is

attributable, not to a person's disability or some other distinguishing characteristic,

but to a circumstance that could involve anyone, laughter is the appropriate reaction.

Indeed, to suppress mirth in such a case is to build a protective wall around the member

of a minority group. While this wall may shield the member of the minority from the few

snickers that everyone occasionally merits, it just as surely precludes the person from

full acceptance as an equal in the world we all inhabit.

An important contrast to the concept exemplified

by the man and his fallen pants was the misuse of a particular characteristic perpetrated

in the Mr. Magoo movie. In Mr. Magoo the attempted humor was specifically based on

exploitation of blindness. In an effort to gain chuckles, blindness was portrayed in a way

that was not only inaccurate but insulting and ultimately harmful. The distorted image of

blindness on which the creators of Mr. Magoo sought to capitalize was, for the most part,

recognized as tasteless. It no longer tickled the funny bone of a society in which the

understanding that blindness does not equate with incapacity is steadily advancing.

In Mr. Magoo the subject of the humor was

blindness. In the case of the man and his fallen pants, however, the humor was derived

from an event that could have happened to anyone. Coincidentally, it befell someone who

was disabled.

In this case the immediate and natural reaction

is the healthiest and most productive one. People should laugh and enjoy the strange

events that fate drops in their path.

Ultimately, the extent to which a person who

happens to be a member of a minority group is subject to laughter for the right reasons is

one of the most accurate measures of equality. Once we are successful in helping society

understand why the incident with the man and his falling pants is funny and why Mr. Magoo

is not, we will have taken one more step toward ending benign discrimination. This reality

is a basic truth that was revealed when the man dropped his pants in President Clinton's

receiving line.