Racist Analogy

A Facebook friend (someone I haven’t seen in person for decades) shared this:

Now there are problems with any analogy but let’s work with the general premise:  the USA is a Grand Old Hotel and, as many old building around the world, was designed and built without any accommodations for the disabled.  That part seems reasonable enough. Let’s go with that.

The modern invention of stairs was hailed as a transportation miracle to allow access to more than one floor of a building. With stairs, more people can access the second floor, not just those tall enough or able to jump high enough. Stairs were the great equalizers and soon everyone had free access to the second floor and above. 

The original analogy, however, ascribes intent to the design since the original owner HATED disabled people and specifically designed the building to keep them out. I deny this premise entirely.  It’s not that the designer of stairs hated the disabled. That designer thought up a brilliant idea to give the vast majority of people access to the second floor. Even someone with one leg could hobble up the stairs with a crutch. 

Someone with no legs? Well, yes, that’s a problem. They can be carried up by someone else, I suppose. The invention of the elevator would have to wait a few (thousand) years.

The owners of the Hotel don’t hate the disabled. They have the best stairs money could buy to get as many paying guests to the upper floors as possible. 

So our Grand Old Hotel has stairs that allow anyone to get to any floor. But yes, there is a very small percentage of the population that do not have the physical ability to climb stairs.  The owners of the hotel eventually realized that they could have more guests if they added ramps, elevators, and more accessible accommodations.  They went through the renovation process and now that Grand Old Hotel is even more Grand and Glorious, with sparkling new fixtures and handholds in the bathrooms, and all doors are extra wide to allow the easy entrance of wheelchairs.  They even have elevators – the latest invention for moving people in vertical directions! Elevators help everyone, not just the disabled. As far as anyone  is concerned, with or without disabilities, this is the best Hotel in the entire world and nothing else even comes close.

The problem is, however, that some people think the Grand Hotel is too pricey. They like staying at the NoTell Motel because of the price but want all the luxury of the Grand Hotel.  Some people think they should run the Hotel. Some others think they should OWN the Hotel. Whether they want to run it or own it, they all want to demolish the Hotel and build one based on their design. 

So these groups of disgruntled guests and non-guests pretend that the ramps, elevators, and other accommodations do not exist and claim the owners, staff, and even the other guests at the hotel hate disabled people.

These destroyers gin up other guests of the Hotel to protest, or at least stay quiet, since no one wants to be labeled as a hater of the Disabled.  By pretending the accommodations do not exist and that nothing has changed since the Hotel was built, they can claim that the whole thing must be torn down.

Even with the truth obvious to everyone – the ramps, elevators, and accommodations exist and there are disabled people on every floor – they still pretend nothing has ever changed and that the Hotel denies access to the disabled, is damp, musty, and completely rotten to the foundation.

There are flaws to this analogy, of course. Skin color is not a physical disability. Did we have “institutional” racism in the past?  Yes, and we dealt with that over the last century. You cannot deny there has been progress.

We can both acknowledge the past and recognize our country is not the same as it was in 1885.