Little People of America

The latest low: The bully-in-chief appoints a judge who supports dwarf-tossing

Candidate Trump mocks a disabled reporter in 2016.

President Trump, whose multifarious assaults on basic decency include mocking a disabled reporter in front of a crowd of hooting supporters, may have hit yet another new low. Neomi Rao, Trump’s choice to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, is an enthusiastic supporter of dwarf-tossing. Rao’s peculiar obsession with the practice of throwing short-statured people against Velcro walls was reported late last week by Stephanie Mencimer in Mother Jones.

As you might imagine, Rao, a veteran right-wing activist currently serving in the Trump administration, does not claim to take part in this humiliating and dangerous practice. Rather, she has argued on several occasions that dwarf-tossing should be a matter of choice, writing that it should be up to the tossee whether picking up a few bucks in some shady barroom is worth the risk to his health and his self-respect.

Rao explained her views several years ago at The Volokh Conspiracy, a libertarian legal blog, in which she criticized a ruling in France against a little person who wanted to take part in dwarf-tossing. Rao wrote that it “demonstrates how a substantive understanding of dignity can be used to coerce individuals by forcing upon them a particular understanding of dignity irrespective of their individual choices.” She added:

The issue is not whether laws prohibiting dwarf throwing, burqa wearing, prostitution, or pornography may be desirable social policy. Rather these examples demonstrate that the conception of dignity used to defend such policies is not that of human agency and freedom of choice, but rather represents a particular moral view of what dignity requires. These laws do not purport to maximize individual freedom, but instead regulate how individuals must behave in order to maintain dignity (and in the case of criminal prohibitions, stay out of jail).

The individual-rights argument may seem appealing. But it ignores all kinds of activities that society has decided to ban or regulate in order to protect not just the person taking part in those activities but also the rest of us — prostitution, as Rao notes, as well as drug use, cockfighting, underage drinking, casino gambling (until recently), practicing medicine without a license, and driving on the wrong side of the street. So it is with dwarf-tossing, which not only puts the person being tossed at risk of injury because of the spinal abnormalities present in most forms of dwarfism but also places others with dwarfism in harm’s way by normalizing a practice that should be considered beyond the pale.

I have skin in this game, though I hardly consider it a game. Our daughter, Rebecca, has achondroplasia, the most common type of dwarfism. My 2003 book, “Little People,” examines the culture and history of the dwarfism. Among the people I interviewed was Doyle Harris, a dispatcher at the University of Louisville and a former official with Little People of America, an organization for dwarfs and their families. As I wrote in the book:

Nearly twenty years ago, he [Harris] and some friends were waiting outside a Louisville nightclub. It was right around the time that dwarf-tossing — an Australian import that rears its ugly head wherever drunk, stupid men in their twenties gather — had first come to the attention of the media. “One of these guys came out — he was a little inebriated — and he went, ‘Oh, they’re going to have dwarf-tossing tonight. Well, let me practice,'” Harris recalled. “And the next thing I know, the guy literally picks me up and throws me out onto the grass. It was not a good situation. It was very demeaning to me. I was in fairly nice clothes, I was looking to go out, and I’m out in the grass, rolling around, getting grass stains and muddy. It was totally against my will.”

Florida, at one time the locus of dwarf-tossing in the United States, banned the practice in 1989. Incredibly, a state legislator proposed lifting the ban in 2011, dredging up the tiresome freedom-of-choice argument. As Angela Van Etten, a lawyer with dwarfism whose work helped lead to the original ban, wrote in The Huffington Post: “Dwarf tossing appeals to a lower instinct in people and creates a hostile environment in which Little People are disrespected and ridiculed. It legitimizes bully behavior.”

Exactly. Yet we now live in an environment in which bullying is not only condoned but indulged in by the president. In that respect, Neomi Rao seems like the perfect Trump appointment. According to Mother Jones, in addition to her fervor for dwarf-tossing, she holds retrograde views on LGBTQ rights and affirmative action and is an anti-regulation zealot. She should not be confirmed. But who will stop her?

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The M-word, the C-word (no, not that C-word), and The Boston Globe

Update. From Ellen Clegg, the ever-responsive editor of The Boston Globe’s opinion pages:

https://twitter.com/ellenclegg/status/817478004918063104

You would think that, somewhere along the way, the climate activist Bill McKibben would have learned that the word midget is incredibly offensive to people in the dwarfism community—along the lines of the N-word among African-Americans. Or you’d think someone working for The Boston Globe’s opinion pages would know it.

Apparently not. Because here are the first two sentences of McKibben’s commentary in today’s Globe: “The Democrats were given one great gift last year. Even as they lost state legislatures and control of the Senate, even as they surrendered governors’ mansions and somehow turned over the White House to a moral midget, one thing broke their way.”

Here is some background on the M-word from Little People of America. I wrote about how the word came into existence in my 2003 book, “Little People.” In 2009 Clark Hoyt, then the public editor of The New York Times, wrote that the term would henceforth be banished.

And before you ask, “Well, how is the M-word offensive when it’s not referring to people with dwarfism?,” ask yourself what contexts would be acceptable for using the N-word. None, right? There you go.

So if the M-word doesn’t already have an entry in the Globe’s stylebook, I hope that’s rectified. And that an email reminder goes out to everyone.

Now that that’s settled, shall I point out that the Globe’s opinion pages also allowed the alt-right insult cuckold to sneak into today’s edition? It’s normally rendered as cuck, but I heard the dog whistle. Woof! If the term is new to you, GQ has an explainer about the term’s pornographic, racist origins.

Style note: Given that I do most of my writing these days for Peter Kadzis and company at WGBHNews.org, I try to stick with their house style at Media Nation, which makes it easier for us to share content. I am told we’re going to go all-in with AP style, with a few exceptions. (We’re keeping serial commas! Yay!) So if you’re wondering why newspaper, magazine, and book titles are not in italics today, that’s the reason. And if you didn’t notice, then you lead a healthier, more balanced life than I do.

Two runners with dwarfism to compete in marathon

Two people with dwarfism are running the Boston Marathon tomorrow, and today’s Boston Globe profiles them in a front-page feature. Globe reporter David Abel interviews Juli Windsor, who lives in the South End, and John Young, a teacher from Salem. His story is accompanied by a terrific video of Windsor produced by Thea Breite.

I don’t know Windsor, but I do know Young. He and his wife, Sue, and their son, Owen, are fixtures at Little People of America events, and we ran into them at a district conference in North Conway just a few weeks ago. Here is his blog. Young tells Abel:

The people who support and encourage me are the ones that get me to the starting line, while the ones who doubt or ridicule me are the ones that carry me to the finish line. Whenever I really start to hurt, I think of someone laughing, pointing, and saying, “You can’t do that!” and it seems to give me the strength to carry on.

Best of luck to Juli and John!

A new look at the dwarfs of Auschwitz

The seven dwarf siblings of the Ovitz family

The Daily Mail has published a lengthy excerpt from a new book about the Ovitz family, a troupe of seven dwarf entertainers from Hungary who were shipped off to Auschwitz and subjected to horrendous torture at the hands of Josef Mengele after it was discovered that they were Jewish.

The book, “Giants: The Dwarfs Of Auschwitz,” was written by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev. It appears to be an extension of an earlier book by the two called “In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe.” (Thanks to Fred Short for pointing me to this.)

I wrote about the Ovitzes in my book about dwarfism, “Little People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter’s Eyes.” There’s a longish section about them toward the end of Chapter 4. I had seen a documentary about the Ovitzes at the Little People of America national conference in 2002, which prompted me to do some additional research.

One of my findings was that Nazis, contrary to what many people within the dwarf community believed, had not targeted people with dwarfism for elimination — unless they were Jews. Indeed, what happened to the Ovitzes underscored the uniquely Jewish nature of the Holocaust.

In the documentary, “Liebe Perla” (“Dear Perla”), Perla Ovtiz recalls that she and her family had continued to tour Europe and perform even after the outbreak of World War II. She remembers a time before their Jewish identity was discovered when “the Nazis gave us a hand, lifted us onto the packed train and helped us find some space.”

Though being Jews landed them in Auschwitz, being dwarfs kept them alive, as Mengele wanted to keep them around for his sick experiments. Another Jewish dwarf, Alexander Katan, was not so lucky. At the Mauthausen concentration camp, he was killed, and his flesh was stripped off his skeleton so that it could be displayed. Koren and Negev write that the Ovitzes feared a similar fate.

Incredibly, well into her later years of life Perla Ovitz remained on some level grateful that Mengele had saved her and her siblings. In “Liebe Perle,” she tells the filmmaker that she cried when she learned Mengele had died in Uruguay. “I can’t say anything bad about him,” she says. Truly a horrible and complicated tale.

Andrew Solomon and “Little People”

I’m pretty excited about this. Nine years ago Andrew Solomon, winner of the National Book Award, blurbed my book on dwarfism, “Little People.” He also interviewed me at the 2003 Little People of America conference for his next project — a book about families whose children were different from their parents, whether they be disabled, gay or suffering from mental illness, to name just a few examples.

That project — “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity” — has just been published, and has been the object of rapturous reviews. The New York Times alone has published two raves (here and here) as well as a feature on Solomon and his own family. And it turns out that I made the cut, as he both quotes from our conversation and cites “Little People” in several spots.

Naturally, I’m trying to figure out how this might benefit “Little People.” Although it’s officially out of print, I sell a high-quality self-published paperback. (You can read about how that came about in a piece I wrote for Nieman Reports.) So far I’ve taken a few small steps: I’ve removed the free online edition (except for the Introduction and Chapter One) and made it easier to buy a copy. As you can see in the right-hand column, I’ve pumped up its presence on Media Nation. And I’m going to try Google ads again, at least through Christmas.

Anyone have any other ideas? Are there any independent bookstores in the area that would be interested in carrying it?

You just can’t keep a bad word down

For those of us in the dwarfism community, it sometimes seems that the outside world is mainly interested in two things: how people with dwarfism are depicted in popular culture and the continued debate over the word “midget,” which is regarded as offensive by nearly everyone within the community.

Here is former New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s 2009 column in which he acknowledges that the “M”-word is offensive and would no longer be used in the Times.

Last week the “M”-word popped up when commentator Bernard Goldberg used it on “The O’Reilly Factor” while critiquing former MSNBC talk-show host Keith Olbermann. In observing that Olbermann’s relatively low ratings in comparison to Fox News were nevertheless higher than anyone else’s at MSNBC, Goldberg compared Olbermann to “the tallest midget in the room.”

My friend Bill Bradford, who’s the senior vice president of Little People of America, called my attention to it on Facebook, and we hashed it out a bit. My inclination was to give a pass to Goldberg on the grounds of his well-documented cluelessness. But another friend, Julie Holland, quickly discovered that Goldberg knew exactly what he was saying. Last February, in defending the use of such charming terms as “Negro” and “retarded,” Goldberg told Bill O’Reilly:

If you use the word midget, the little people community are going to jump all over you. I mean not literally, but they’re going to get on you.

That sound you hear in the background is O’Reilly snickering.

On Sunday, meanwhile, the Boston Herald ran a feature on a show at the Seaport World Trade Center charmingly called “Motorcycles, Midgets and Mayhem,” starring dwarf wrestlers called the Half-Pint Brawlers.

Another LPA friend, District 1 director Barbara Spiegel, is quoted as objecting both to the spectacle and to the use of the “M”-word. The story, by Renee Nadeau Algarin, is benign enough, and I’m not suggesting the Herald should have ignored it. But it’s accompanied by an extensive slide show and a come-on to buy reprints. The comments are about as bad as you would expect.

There’s no question that the way people with dwarfism are depicted in the media is far more positive than it was a generation or two ago. Reality shows such as “Little People, Big World” and “The Little Couple” have helped normalize dwarfism in the eyes of the public.

Yet in the more benighted corners of the media, it seems that things haven’t changed much at all.

A few thoughts on China’s dwarfism theme park

Billy Barty and Midgets of America gather in Reno, Nev., in 1957.

There’s a fascinating story in today’s New York Times about a theme park in China that stars people with dwarfism. Sharon LaFraniere writes that the park, the Kingdom of the Little People, is controversial because it depicts dwarfs in demeaning roles. And there’s no doubt it’s jarring to modern Western sensibilities. But I’m not sure it’s really that simple.

For one thing, it’s clear from the story that, for people with disabilities living in China, the Kingdom of the Little People is a pretty good gig. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

Many performers said they enjoyed being part of a community where everyone shares the same challenges, like the height of a sink. “Before, when we were at home, we didn’t know anyone our size. When we hang out together with normal-size people, we can not really do the same things,” said Wu Zhihong, 20. “So I really felt lonely sometimes.”

For another, I think those of us involved with the dwarfism community sometimes tend to forget the reality of the not-too-distant past. Gary Arnold, spokesman for Little People of America, is quoted as saying, “I think it is horrible. What is the difference between it and a zoo?”

Arnold’s point is well-taken, to an extent. Yet LPA was founded by an actor, the late Billy Barty, and the group originally came together in the late 1950s under a banner that read “Midgets of America” — something that would provoke protests today.

Moreover, a number of people with dwarfism, including intelligent, successful people who are LPA members in good standing, have exploited their unique features to get work in the entertainment business. And movies like “The Station Agent” remain the exception.

In the last few years we’ve seen the mainstreaming of dwarfism, due in large measure to television series such as “Little People, Big World” and “The Little Couple.” As I’ve written before, I think such shows are, overall, a positive. Yet we’re kidding ourselves if we think they’re not on some level exploitive as well. Who would sit on the couch and watch average-size, non-dysfunctional (my Gosselin caveat!) families go about their daily lives?

Finally, you’ll note that I did slip in the word “dwarf” even though Arnold is quoted as saying that some find it offensive. Unlike the M-word, on which there is universal agreement as to its offensiveness, the notion that “dwarf” is offensive is not a mainstream view within LPA, although Arnold is right that there are those who don’t like it. But it is a word my daughter uses, and I am not offended.

You didn’t think I was going to close this out without flogging my book, did you? Here you go.

You will also note, when you look at the photos that accompany the Times story, that one of them is the same picture that was hilariously misidentified yesterday as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.