In Defense of Pandering
A conversation with Emily Ladau
Before we get started, Aunties, a quick poll.
Thanks for weighing in!
Now Let’s Get To It
So Aunties, do you know any kids who are in a dual language program at school? Some of the kids in my life do Spanish immersion, meaning half of the school day they learn entirely in Spanish, and half in English. Some students in the class speak Spanish at home, some speak English, and some speak both. Schools in my area also offer Mandarin immersion and Vietnamese immersion, serving the populations that predominate in their feeder areas. Dual language immersion programs benefit many kids and families because students get to learn in their home or heritage language while also learning an additional language that’s positioned as equal in status and value.
Here’s a real double-edged sword for dual language programs, though: the influence of comparatively affluent families who speak English at home. On the one hand, such parents flock to dual language immersion, bringing needed resources and influence. On the other hand, these parents tend to throw their weight around — whether or not what they want is good for heritage language students. Schools may have to decide how much to capitulate to powerful parents’ expectations. For example, in order to preserve these parents’ support for a dual language program, a school or district might decide they need to give away more of their coveted spots to white kids who speak English at home.
Alright, so what do you think about this? Should schools indulge affluent parents by giving them enough of what they want to keep them onside? Or should they prioritize the needs of heritage language speakers even if it means affluent families might leave, taking their resources and the political will to support dual language immersion with them? More broadly, should schools pander to comparatively affluent parents for the sake of preserving programs that serve kids and families with greater need?
Today we’re philosophizing about pandering as a political strategy: we’re weighing the circumstances under which it might make sense to give powerful people a little more of what they desire or demand – but in pursuit of a greater good.
My collaborator in exploring this question is the wise and wonderful Emily Ladau, a disability justice activist, writer, and consultant whose newsletter, Words I Wheel By, I have come to value so highly. For Emily, the concept of pandering often arises in the course of her work demystifying disability for non-disabled audiences. Making disability and disability justice comprehensible to non-disabled people often requires breaking things down in very simple terms, and Emily has sometimes been accused of oversimplifying complex issues.
As the title of this post suggests, we both believe that sometimes it’s good to simplify – or even oversimplify – issues that are complicated. We believe it’s good to sometimes give powerful people what they want in order to keep them aligned with our mission. We are in favor of purposeful, strategic pandering. Our conversation today focuses mostly on questions of word choice and pacing, but I teed up this post with the example of indulging affluent parents in schools because it’s all related.
Now, we recorded while I was in the midst of a bad head cold, so I’ve edited today’s transcript a bit more than usual. You can read the edited version below, or play the video to watch our unedited conversation.
Note: At the end of this post, I’m offering a bonus for paid subscribers: suggestions for how to warmly and non-exploitatively pander to people who have more power than we do — so that they’re more likely to have our backs when it matters. 😀
Emily Ladau: When my book, Demystifying Disability, came out, I got such a range of comments. The feedback was either, “you are pandering to people without disabilities,” or “this is way too radical, I want nothing to do with this.” And it made me realize you’re always going to be too much for some people and not enough for others. I was especially frustrated when one person said to me, “Did you write this book for children?” It was frustrating because writing in plain accessible language is good for everybody. Everybody has different levels of cognition, different reading levels, different comprehension abilities, and that’s normal. So rather than judging how I’m trying to communicate in a more approachable way, let’s flip the script on pandering. I don’t mean coddling people or telling them everything they do is fine. But actually trying to bridge a gap is something not enough people do.
Lisa: Our conversations, Emily, have been helping me realize the extent to which clear communication is an access issue. Frequently when we get accused of pandering – and by pandering, we’re talking both about accusations of dumbing down our language and about hand-holding people with privilege – we’re slowing down and going at the speed people need in order to process their feelings. They might say, “I’m not an ableist person,” “I’m not a racist person,” “I’m not a sexist person,” or other defensive claims that arise when we get confronted with our biases.
Of course, there’s an important argument to be made that ableism and racism and sexism are urgent. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s book, Why We Can’t Wait, is just as timely today as it was in 1964. But we actually do need to slow down and let people process their stuff, even though these issues are urgent, even though it shouldn’t be the people with disabilities or the people targeted by racism or patriarchy or whatever else who have to do the educating.
In the cozy revolution post I wrote recently, one of my tenets was “don’t use big words when you can use accessible words.” We don’t need to say “intersectionality” when we can just explain multiple different ways that people are harmed by different kinds of injustice. We don’t need to say “oppression” when we can just say “it’s not fair.” Humans understand fairness from a very, very early age. And using language that’s accessible to everybody is how we can move forward. But that means somebody has to do the work of demystifying.
Emily: A hundred percent. The fact is, I can’t ask you to understand my experiences if I’m not communicating them. And I say this as someone who grew up in my own bubble despite being marginalized in multiple ways. I’m a disabled woman. I’m a Jewish woman. I grew up in a predominantly Italian and Irish Catholic town with not a lot of people of color. It took me a really long time to break out of that bubble, and it wasn’t until college that I became aware of all the things I’d never learned. I think if we fault people without giving them the chance to learn and bringing them on the journey with us, we’re closer to alienating them than bringing them into the movement. We’ve been having these conversations for years – eternity, it feels like – so people are tired of waiting. But as much as I wish we didn’t still need to have these conversations, I’m a realist. No matter how much we should already be at a certain point, we’re not there yet.
Lisa: I taught for several years in a privileged, affluent, predominantly white school district. I went from the poverty-impacted, diverse urban public school where I did my student teaching to this very privileged public school where I started my career. I was trying to do social justice education with a lot of rich white kids, 14- and 15-year-olds, who didn’t have much of a frame of reference for injustice because they’re children, and because of the communities they grew up in. We certainly can’t blame children for not understanding the world, and when you’re teaching children, you need to go slow. That’s not pandering, that’s just teaching.
What has become clear to me over the years is that adults are not so different from kids. It’s interesting that you’ve been accused of pandering in terms of “writing for a child.” To my mind, that’s disrespectful of children, honestly, because kids can actually understand very complicated issues if you explain them well and give good examples. I taught about Israel and Palestine and the history of Haiti and all kinds of complex international policy conversations, and my students were perfectly able to handle that. And ultimately everybody is a lot like a 14-year-old who only has the conditioning and upbringing that they have.
Emily: This is one of my biggest pet peeves, when people forget that we learn what we live. If you haven’t been exposed to something and you don’t have that frame of reference, that’s not a moral failing. What can eventually be deemed a moral failing is if you are repeatedly exposed to new ideas and continue to reject them rather than trying to expand your understanding of the world. But if you truly haven’t engaged with these ideas before, I’m not going to start out being mad at you.
Lisa: I had a related thought, but I’m recovering from a cold, so my brain is even foggier than usual.
Emily: Well, that also points to the fact that it’s okay to move slowly in these conversations.
Lisa: Oh yes, exactly! Whenever we’re talking about differences in power – and that’s really what this comes down to, who has power and who doesn’t – we’re necessarily having complex conversations, and there are always people with access needs: maybe because they’re getting over a cold, maybe because they have long COVID, maybe because they’ve never come across this content before and it’s blowing their minds and they’re feeling defensive. There are all kinds of reasons people need to go slowly. And there’s a righteous frustration with that – righteous in a positive way – but we can’t act out on that frustration if we hope to actually succeed.
Emily: Exactly. I try to approach people in good faith. I don’t actually think that every single person wants to be bigoted if they have bigoted beliefs. I think it’s just a product of their surroundings. Especially in the case of disability justice, people just aren’t exposed to it very often. It was not in my history textbooks. It was barely in the media when I was growing up.
Lisa: We’re often segregated at school.
Emily: Right, there are special education classes instead of integrated classrooms. So even though the Americans with Disabilities Act has been around since 1990, that’s actually only three decades in the whole of human history.
Lisa: Right. For a lot of human history, people with disabilities were so excluded, they were even left to die.
Emily: Literally. We’re still not even a lifetime away from the murder of disabled people in the Holocaust. We are mere decades away – my mother’s lifetime, my father’s lifetime – from there being laws that kept disabled people off the streets, called the Ugly Laws. And so when you think about it from that perspective, do I wish I could just put myself out of a job and we could be done with this overnight? Yes, I really do. But I’ve come to realize I’m going to change more people’s hearts and minds if I’m not out to make them feel guilty about history, and instead I say, here’s why this was bad, and here’s how you can do better.
Lisa: And the people who can quickly figure out how to act right – I don’t know if you’ve found this, Emily, but in my experience – aren’t necessarily the people you would think. It’s not the exact same people as those who know what words to use. The people who know what words to use have typically been to graduate school, or are at least graduate school adjacent, with a large social science vocabulary that’s often inaccessible. The reality is that you can know all the right words and still act like an asshole, and you can know none of the right words and be able to show up exactly as needed – to be a gracious and humble learner and move a long distance in a short period of time.
Emily: I struggle with this internally because I started going to grad school and then had to leave the program. I was pursuing my master’s in Disability Studies. As I was making the decision to leave, I found myself really frustrated by this idea that we were turning people’s lived experiences into academic jargon. It didn’t feel like I was getting anything out of it, because I could go find their stories on my own and engage in a much more human-centered way. But that also means I’m now in this weird spot where I sometimes don’t get taken seriously because I don’t have those credentials next to my name.
Lisa: There are massive access barriers to graduate school. The writer Jessica Slice, who has the same disability as I do – hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome – has written about this in her book, Unfit Parent. She wrote about going to graduate school for, I think, social work. She uses a wheelchair and she experienced all these barriers doing her clinical internships because the physical placement sites weren’t wheelchair-accessible. She wrote that if she hadn’t had active champions among the faculty, she wouldn’t have been able to complete her master’s degree. And that’s just one example.
Beyond the financial barriers and all the gatekeeping to get into graduate school, there are all kinds of barriers to accessing the language that gives people the credentials to be recognized as credentialed to talk about unfairness. But at the end of the day, actually lots of people are in a position to talk about their lived experience of unfairness.
Emily: Coziness is the vibe that is often missing from this work. I understand that literally people are dying – there is real urgency – and somebody is going to say, “what do you mean you want to curl up with a blanket and a cup of tea right now?” But if we can find moments to give ourselves a little bit of grace, and to be warm and cozy with each other, I think we’re getting somewhere.
Lisa: Unfairness as a concept is actually so domestic, rooted early on in the private sphere. When we first start thinking about fairness and unfairness, we are small children, talking about fairness in the context of, “he took my toy,” or “I don’t want to take a bath now.” Our first understanding of fairness happens in the home. And I think it helps to be safe in our nest, to feel cozy, in order to have conversations about what’s fair and what’s not.
That’s what injustice and oppression come down to: is it fair or is it not fair? What does fair mean? How do we make sure things are fair? We need a pretty high level of – if not safety, then being welcomed – to have those kinds of conversations.
I also think it’s incredibly cathartic to be able to name when something is unfair and be heard. There’s something kind and welcoming about being able to say, “this thing happened to me and it was not fair,” or, “I see something unfair happening to somebody else,” and have that be received and responded to.
Emily: Even as we’re having this conversation, I’m sitting here waiting for somebody to say, “you guys are oversimplifying this.” But are we? Because clearly the approach of alienating people is not working. I think there’s a difference between people being critical and people critiquing. I’m very open to people who have critiques and have ways of thinking about this differently. But people who are just downright critical – that’s always tough for me to navigate, because my intention is to be welcoming, and criticism without meaningful dialogue doesn’t feel like we’re getting to what we’re trying to accomplish.
The other thing I want to make sure we fit in is that pandering can mean talking down, but that’s not how we’re talking about it. I’m not talking about being patronizing. I’m not talking about treating someone like they can’t handle the truth. And I’m not talking about sugarcoating the truth. Those are key distinctions between pandering to the point of straight-up coddling, and pandering meaning: “we are trying to make this accessible.”
Lisa: It’s frustrating to have to go slow. It’s frustrating to have to be really purposeful and deliberate about the words we choose. It’s frustrating to be called upon to indulge or capitulate to people’s lack of wisdom, knowledge, and perspective. But there is nothing more important than building a more just world, and if we take seriously that charge, then we need to be willing to tolerate some frustration.
To me, it’s beautiful that you – a wheelchair user, a visibly disabled person – wrote a book called Demystifying Disability. And it’s also very much incumbent on people who benefit from privilege, who have done the work, to be the ones leading in bringing others along with us. It shouldn’t have to be on the people who are the targets of the unfairness.
Emily: I think I exist at a bit of a nexus point for that, because I have a level of socioeconomic privilege. I have familial support. I identify as the gender I was assigned at birth. I communicate verbally. In a lot of ways I was well set up to do this, and I don’t take that for granted. Yes, I am disabled, and yes, it is exhausting to be an educator about disability at times. But because I’ve been afforded a lot of good things in my life, it set me up well to do this work.
And I want other people to feel like they can have these conversations too. Every time I bring another person along who is now willing to engage with this topic, I’m excited. There are so many people who have been doing this work for so long. And as far as I’m concerned, if I can change one person’s heart and mind, I’m very happy. If the way I had to do that was by guiding them and being gentle with them – not avoiding pushing them, but just being kind in the process – then it’s worth it. That’s someone else who can carry this conversation forward. It doesn’t just have to be me, it doesn’t just have to be disabled people.
Lisa: Emily, it’s been so good to talk to you. I hope everybody will check out Emily Ladau’s excellent newsletter, Words I Wheel By. I love it. I actually recently got influenced by her to buy a headache remedy that actually works, which is amazing because I have really problematic chronic headaches. It doesn’t make the headache completely go away, but it eases the pain. Emily has a lot of good disability hacks.
Emily: You’ve got to be a researcher by default when you’re disabled!
Bonus for Paid Subscribers
Aunties, one of my superpowers is forming friendly, non-exploitative relationships with people who have more power than I do, such that they then support me in my various schemes and projects. After the paywall, I share a few tips toward what I call “pandering with purpose” – befriending and aligning ourselves with the most powerful people in the room so they’ll have our backs when it matters. No cynical manipulation required!
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