Privilege, ableism, and the just world model

In a footnote on another post, I mentioned that the just world model is ableist. Someone asked that I explain.

Here’s the explanation.

The “just world model” says that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It provides a kind of security: you can keep bad things from happening to you. The just world model says that: someone who was assaulted shouldn’t have had an open window (or gotten drunk, or worn that dress), the Black driver should have been more polite, the person who died of a heart attack shouldn’t have been such an over-achiever, the person who got cancer doubted God.

The just world model is a world in which individuals are in perfect and complete control of our lives. It’s a really comforting narrative. It’s magical thinking. It says that if you do this thing and don’t do that thing, you will be protected from disaster.

I have a crank theory that people look at a homeless person and respond in one of two ways: 1) I would never let that happen to me, and that person should just suck it up and get a job; or 2) There but for the grace of God go I.

My crank theory is that acknowledging our common humanity with a homeless person, that something like a TBI could put us in that situation, is terrifying for some people. Some people find the notion that individuals do not have perfect agency unimaginably threatening. Republicanism has embraced the just world model, especially in its attachment to neoliberalism (which is pure just world model), but also in its commitment to the Strict Father Model (if you exert complete control over your children you will raise them to be good).

Various non-partisan ideologies similarly say that, if a bad thing happened to you, you did something to deserve it (anti-vax, a lot of “healthy lifestyle” rhetoric, the idea that people who get cancer or have heart attacks had personality flaws that brought those conditions on). Thus, what might have its origin in an irrational desire to feel more comfortable about how much control we have in our own life ends up enabling a kind of political hardheartedness regardless of Dem v. GOP affiliation.

Regardless of whatever psychological needs the just world model soothes, the consequence of attachment to it is that it drops a sociopathic curtain between us and victims. One of the ways it does so is by closing off any possibility of talking about systemic discrimination.

I work on a campus much of which was built when the assumption was that anyone in a wheelchair shouldn’t be in public. There are steps everywhere. There are steps that aren’t necessary from an engineering perspective, but are there for aesthetic reasons. The way the campus is built means that there is an extra burden on someone who has even the slightest mobility issue—it’s harder for them to be a successful student, staff, or faculty member.

At this campus, being able-bodied gives a person a fair amount of privilege—it’s possible to schedule classes back to back that are in distant buildings, it’s easy to get to office hours regardless of where they are, there’s always a bathroom nearby you can use, you don’t show up to class or meeting already exhausted from negotiating the trip there. The just world model says that you earned that privilege by choosing not to have a disability—the people who are encumbered by the building design brought it on themselves. Since they could simply choose not to be encumbered, it isn’t necessary to do the expensive work of ensuring the buildings are accessible. There isn’t a systemic problem—there are just individuals, all of whom are getting what they deserve. So, the just world. Model simultaneously reinforces privilege and denies its existence.