The strange case of anna stubblefield

The Strange Case Of Anna Stubblefield Essay

“The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield”
1. Write a letter to each of the following:
A). Anna
B). D.J.
C). P. & Wesley
D). Anna’s ex-husband, Roger, and their children
The letters should include any thoughts, opinions, advice and questions you feel are appropriate.
2. Flip it. Re-imagine the details of this story. Make Anna “Allen” instead, a black man. Make D.J. “Denise”, a white woman with all of D.J.’s disabilities. How might the story have been different?
3. Cast the film version of this story. Choose an actor to play each of the individuals named in Question 1 and make a brief statement explaining why each actor you choose would be best in their role.
4. Describe a time in your life when you believed something without support from anyone else. Be sure to include details and to describe the outcome.
5. Get to know The Strange Case of Rachel Dolezal. What do Rachel and Anna have in common--and what is different about their stories?*
6. What if the nonbelievers are wrong? Imagine, tomorrow, there is a breakthrough invention of some kind that allows people like D.J. to have a voice that all the experts agree is truly their own. D.J. says he loves Anna and is devastated that the authorities and his family removed her from his life. Write a letter of apology to him.
*Please remember: All quotations used to support your answer to Question 5 should be cited in the body of your answer using the MLA In-text Citation format. SEE MY SAMPLE FORMAT OF THE PROPER WAY TO DO THIS. Also, your paper must include a bibliography citing each supporting text you use, including electronic sources. The bibliography should be in the MLA Works Cited format.
Sample Format for Proper In-Text Citations of Electronic Sources
First of all, “electronic sources” means online sources. Do not use complete URLs. Only provide partial URLs. For example, use CNN.com or Forbes.com, instead of http://www.cnn.com or http://www.forbes.com.

Part 1 Anna didn’t want to keep her feelings secret. As far as she knew, neither did D.J. In recent weeks, their relationship had changed, and it wasn’t clear when or how to share the news. ‘‘It’s your call,’’ she said to him in the lead-up to a meeting with his mother and older brother. ‘‘It’s your family. It’s up to you.’’ When she arrived at the house on Memorial Day in 2011, Anna didn’t know what D.J. planned to do. His brother, Wesley, was working in the garden, so she went straight inside to speak with D.J. and his mother, P. They chatted for a while at the dining table about D.J.’s plans for school and for getting his own apartment. Then there was a lull in the conversation after Wesley came back in, and Anna took hold of D.J.’s hand. ‘‘We have something to tell you,’’ they announced at last. ‘‘We’re in love.’’ ‘‘What do you mean, in love?’’ P. asked, the color draining from her face. To Wesley, she looked pale and weak, like ‘‘Caesar when he found out that Brutus betrayed him.’’ He felt sick to his stomach. What made them so uncomfortable was not that Anna was 41 and D.J. was 30, or that Anna is white and D.J. is black, or even that Anna was married with two children while D.J. had never dated anyone. What made them so upset — what led to all the arguing that followed, and the criminal trial and million-​dollar civil suit — was the fact that Anna can speak and D.J. can’t; that she was a tenured professor of ethics at Rutgers University in Newark and D.J. has been declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler. Anna does not agree with this assessment. She does not deny (as no one could) that D.J. is impaired: His cerebral palsy leaves him prone to muscle spasms in his face, his neck, his torso and his arms and hands. She acknowledges that it’s hard for him to stay in one position, that muscle contractions sometimes twist his spine and clench his fingers in a useless ball. It’s clear to her, as it is to everyone, that he has trouble making eye contact and keeping objects fixed in view. She knows that he wears diapers and cannot dress himself; that he can walk only if someone steadies him; and that otherwise he gets around by scooting on the floor. She knows that D.J. screams when he’s unhappy and chirps when he’s excited, but that he can’t control his vocal cords. Anna understands that even now, at 35, D.J. has never said a word. But she takes issue with the other half of D.J.’s diagnosis: that he’s not just spastic but has a very low I.Q. In 2004, five years before Anna met him, a clinical psychologist named Wayne Tillman, who consults for New Jersey’s Bureau of Guardianship Services, assessed D.J. and found that his impairments precluded any formal testing of intelligence, but that certain facts could be inferred: ‘‘His comprehension seemed to be quite limited,’’ ‘‘his attention span was very short’’ and he ‘‘lacks the cognitive capacity to understand and participate in decisions.’’ D.J. could not even carry out basic, preschool-​level tasks. A few months later, a court made P. and Wesley his legal guardians.

From the time she met D.J., Anna thought Tillman had it wrong. D.J. might be unable to speak or hold a pencil, but those are motor skills, not mental ones, and their absence didn’t mean his mind was blank. What if D.J. had a private chamber in his head, a place where grown-up thoughts were trapped behind his palsy? Then, of course, he would fail the standard tests of his I.Q. — tests made for people who can answer questions verbally or read and write. What D.J. needed was another way to share his deep intelligence. At the request of D.J.’s family, Anna began to work with him, using a controversial method known as ‘‘facilitated communication.’’ Starting with her hand beneath his elbow, she helped him point at pictures, and then at letters, and eventually at the buttons of a Neo, a hand-held keyboard with a built-in screen. With his hand in hers, she helped him type out words after 30 years of silence. Wesley and his mother had been thrilled with D.J.’s progress, but now, suddenly, they recoiled. (Neither D.J.’s family nor Anna agreed to be interviewed for this article; all their quotes and recollections are drawn from court records and testimony. P. and Wesley are referred to by a middle initial and a middle name to shield D.J.’s identity, which has not been publicly revealed.) When Wesley told Anna he thought she had taken advantage of his brother, she could not muster a response. At last, with her help, D.J. began typing: ‘‘No one’s been taken advantage of. I’ve been trying to seduce Anna for years, and she resisted valiantly.’’ Then he typed another message, meant for Anna: ‘‘Kiss me.’’ Wesley walked out. Later, after he told Anna that she wasn’t to see his brother anymore, she tried to plead her case by phone: ‘‘I will put in writing, prick my finger and sign with blood — whatever makes you reassured that this is for real,’’ she promised in a voice mail message. ‘‘I will leave my husband, and I will make a permanent life and home with [D.J.].’’ But the family had had enough. What at first struck them as a miracle — a voice for D.J., his inner self revealed — now seemed a fraud. D.J. could not have given his consent to any love affair, they later told the authorities, because he suffers from profound mental disabilities, just as the psychologists had always told them. His ‘‘messages’’ must have been a sham. If Anna pretended otherwise, it was only so she could use D.J. as a guinea pig for research, or to further her career, or because, as Wesley would later say during the three-week trial for sexual assault that concluded this month in Newark, ‘‘she was having some sick, twisted fantasy.’’ Anna has never wavered in her claim that she and D.J. fell in love and that his messages were his. Even after she was indicted, she seemed more concerned about his fate than her own. ‘‘In the spring of 2011, [D.J.’s] access to his means of communication was taken from him,’’ she wrote in a chapter for a recent academic book, which was published while the justice system creaked its way toward trial, ‘‘and he is once again treated as severely intellectually impaired by those who have control over his life. This chapter is dedicated to him, in hope that he will one day regain his voice and his freedom.’’

Marjorie Anna Stubblefield goes by her middle name, pronounced with an aristocratic a, as in the word ‘‘nirvana.’’ Her last name is her former husband’s. Years ago, she was Margie McClennen, an honors student who grew up Jewish in the nearly all-white town of Plymouth, Mich. ‘‘I was raised to believe that I have the responsibility of tikkun olam, repairing the world,’’ Anna wrote in her 2005 book ‘‘Ethics Along the Color Line.’’ As a high-school student, she put that lesson into practice, writing articles for the school newspaper — one about a classmate who became pregnant, and another about a press-​freedom case involving Plymouth students. Each won a national award. While a sophomore, Anna played the title role in a town production of ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’’ ‘‘Marjorie just was Anne Frank,’’ says Elyse Mirto, a fellow cast member who is now an actor. ‘‘You know that famous quote — ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart’? That was Marjorie.’’ Her parents were involved in local politics, environmentalism and women’s rights, but their most enduring cause was that of people with disabilities. Each trained in special education for their Ph.D.s. Her mother, Sandra McClennen, started working with blind, cognitively impaired children in 1963. For decades, she taught disabled people social skills, like shaking hands and talking appropriately with strangers, in the hope of helping them move out of state-run hospitals and into community housing. Anna shared this interest in disabilities: As a high-school student, she studied Braille and learned the alphabet in sign language. But as a junior academic, she would apply the mandate of tikkun olam to a different focus — the fight for racial justice. Since getting her Ph.D. in 2000, she has become a prominent scholar in the field of Africana philosophy, has published widely on race and ethics and has served as the chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers — the first and only white scholar ever to have done so. ‘‘Our world is in shambles,’’ she wrote in ‘‘Ethics Along the Color Line.’’ ‘‘White supremacy is central to this state of affairs, and we cannot repair the world without ending it.’’ Her own family is mixed-​race — she has two children with her ex-​husband, Roger Stubblefield, a black tuba player and classical composer. For 11 years, she served on the faculty at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, whose student body is among the nation’s most diverse. Yet for all her work on behalf of African-​Americans, she worried that she might be ambushed by the ‘‘habits of racism.’’ ‘‘Even in well-​intentioned quests to be antiracist,’’ she wrote, ‘‘white people all too often invade or destroy the space of nonwhite people.’’ The same essay lays out what could be a thesis statement for her whole career: It is crucial, she wrote, for white philosophers ‘‘to wrestle with the horrors and conundrums of whiteness.’’ Those ‘‘horrors and conundrums,’’ as Anna saw them, formed the nexus of oppression she had sworn to fight in all its forms. As the years went by, her mission seemed to broaden and merge into her mother’s. By 2007, Anna had begun to argue that a person’s intellect — and the degree to which he or she is ‘‘disabled’’ — could be as much a social construct, as much a venue for tyranny, as race, gender or sexuality. It was, after all, white elites, she wrote, who first devised measures of I.Q. ‘‘as both a rationalization and a tool of anti-black oppression.’’

With this shift in her scholarship, Anna began to wrestle not just with race but with disability; not just with racism but with ableism. If poor, black Americans were the most vulnerable members of society, she wrote in 2009, then poor, black, disabled Americans — men like D.J., born with cerebral palsy, raised by a single mother, seemingly unable to communicate — were the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Voiceless in both fact and metaphor, she said, they were the ones ‘‘whom we push so far to the margins of our society that most of us, regardless of race, do not even notice when they fall off the edge.’’ By the time that warning made it into print, Anna had been working with D.J. for about a year. This was her mitzvah and her tikkun olam. She was helping to repair the world. When D.J.’s brother finished his dissertation, he included a dedication to his family: ‘‘Mom, I stand in awe of your strength and grace,’’ he wrote. Wesley also put in a message to his little brother: ‘‘[D.J.], you never cease to amaze me.’’ Wesley graduated from high school in 1993, then enrolled at Rutgers. He was always very close to his brother, whom he sometimes calls ‘‘Baby Bubba.’’ By the time Wesley was named one of D.J.’s legal guardians, he had earned a master’s degree in history; in 2009, he was on track to get his Ph.D. and in one of Anna’s courses. During class, Anna showed part of a 2004 Oscar-​nominated documentary called ‘‘Autism Is a World,’’ narrated by Julianna Margulies and co-​produced by CNN. The film described a nonverbal girl with disabilities and an I.Q. of just 29 who went to college after learning to type using facilitated communication, or F.C. The girl reminded Wesley of D.J., and after class he went to Anna for advice: Could his brother also learn to use a keyboard? Anna said she had attended a three-day workshop on the technique the year before and maybe she could help. One Saturday not long after, Wesley and P. took D.J. up to Anna’s office in Conklin Hall. In preparation for their visit, Anna had cut out pictures from magazines and drawn on index cards. ‘‘In which room would you find a stove?’’ she asked, laying out four cards showing a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom and a laundry room. ‘‘Please don’t be insulted,’’ she added quickly. ‘‘I assume you know the answers to these questions.’’ D.J. couldn’t name the pictures or gesture at them on his own. It seemed to Anna that he would try to point and then freeze up and lock his hands together. So she used the method that she learned during the workshop. First, she placed her hand beneath his elbow to stabilize his arm and found that, with this help, he could pick out the picture of the kitchen. Then she asked him to show her the president of the United States, and D.J. pointed — still with her support — to a photo of Barack Obama. Now she used her other hand to tuck his pinkie, ring and middle fingers lightly under hers, as if their hands were spooning, with just his index finger sticking out. From this position, she introduced a set of letter cards and finally a keyboard. ‘‘It was clear he knew the alphabet and could spell simple words,’’ she said later. ‘‘He was a fast learner.’’

P. took D.J. to Rutgers every other Saturday and then asked Anna over to her house for more facilitation. ‘‘I would get excited: ‘Did he do something?’ ’’ P. said. ‘‘I tried to contain myself, but [Anna] said I was distracting him.’’ At one point, Anna had to make P. leave the room. That fall, P. took more than half a dozen mothers of children with disabilities — friends from her support group — to meet with Anna and learn about facilitated communication. (One soon began working with Anna.) ‘‘I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread,’’ P. said. Wesley was enthusiastic, too. When he met other users of facilitated communication, he noticed that D.J. was among the very few who weren’t white and didn’t come from some degree of privilege. ‘‘I was proud,’’ he said in court. ‘‘Who wouldn’t be?’’ His brother ‘‘was the Jackie Robinson of F.C.’’ The method that Anna used with D.J., and with several other clients at the time, was devised some 40 years ago to help a girl with cerebral palsy named Anne McDonald. Born in 1961 to a family that ran a dry-​cleaning business in a railway town 60 miles north of Melbourne, Australia, she came out feet first, with signs of fetal distress. For the first hour of her life, she could not breathe on her own. At 3, she was given a diagnosis of spastic quadriplegia with severe mental retardation and sent to the St. Nicholas Hospital for children with profound disabilities. Even as a teenager, McDonald was small enough to fit into a baby stroller and weighed less than 30 pounds. Her eyes were often crossed, and her arms, neck and tongue remained in constant motion. When Rosemary Crossley, then an assistant at the Mental Health Authority, first saw McDonald, she was bone thin and writhing on the floor. Neither McDonald nor any other child had toys or wheelchairs, Crossley has said, and they weren’t getting an education, either. ‘‘Just the floor and a cot,’’ is how she remembered it. In 1974, Crossley selected McDonald and seven other children for a special play group. She called them ‘‘beanbaggers’’ — most were so physically disabled that they could sit only in beanbag chairs. Three years later, she turned the play group into a communication study. Her plan was to ask the kids to point at objects, photographs and words, and thus find a way for them to voice their basic needs. She started with McDonald: ‘‘ ‘Annie, I think I can teach you to talk,’ ’’ she recalls in ‘‘Annie’s Coming Out,’’ the memoir she wrote with McDonald. ‘‘ ‘Not with your mouth ... but with your hands, by pointing to pictures of things.’ ’’ The problem was that McDonald had a lot of trouble pointing. When she tried to move her arm, Crossley wrote, it would ‘‘shut up like a rabbit trap,’’ sometimes snapping back against her face. Crossley realized that she would have to keep it balanced. ‘‘I was acting as a responsive item of furniture, not moving her arm but simply facilitating her own movement.’’ The supported pointing worked brilliantly. Now, McDonald could pick out word-blocks and form sentences like ‘‘I want a book, please.’’ Just two weeks into this training, Crossley took out a magnetic board with letters on it to see if McDonald could spell things on her own. Less than a week later, McDonald pointed to the letters ‘I’ and ‘H’ and then to 11 more, producing

​‘‘IHATEFATROSIE.’’ ‘‘This is the first sentence Annie ever spelled,’’ Crossley wrote. ‘‘Annie had freed herself.’’ After a month, McDonald demonstrated a familiarity with local politics. In two months, she was doing fractions. It all happened so quickly that some of Crossley’s colleagues wondered if her assisted pointing might be a fraud. Perhaps Crossley had controlled the children’s hands herself, guiding them to shapes and letters in the way that people move the pointer on a Ouija board. Crossley had the same concern. ‘‘What I did not know was whether I was subconsciously manipulating her,’’ she wrote, ‘‘or imagining her hand movements over the letters and making up sentences to fit what were really random twitchings.’’ But she became convinced that the method worked after McDonald started spelling things with other people — including references to private jokes that no one else could have known. How had she learned so much so fast? She had worked out the rudiments of language by watching television and overhearing nurses’ conversations. She had learned arithmetic by counting slats on the barriers that enclosed her cot. Soon after McDonald turned 18, she went to court for the right to leave St. Nicholas. In a proceeding, she was shown an arbitrary pair of words — ‘‘string’’ and ‘‘quince’’ — while Crossley was not in the room. Then she had to spell them out with Crossley’s help. ‘‘String’’ and ‘‘quit,’’ she wrote. Not exactly right, but close enough. The judge accepted the method and ruled that McDonald was competent to make her own decisions. Addressing the press right after, she spelled: ‘‘Thank you. Free the still imprisoned!’’ McDonald went on to graduate from college and died at 49. The philosophy that drove Crossley’s work, one of radical inclusion, was gaining traction in the world of special education. In 1984, the same year that ‘‘Annie’s Coming Out’’ was made into a movie, Anne Donnellan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, published a sort of manifesto for disability rights. An academic paper called ‘‘The Criterion of the Least Dangerous Assumption,’’ it advised teachers on how to treat disabled children: When you assume they will never function as adults, when you shunt them into special classes and give them toys meant for younger children, you make them victims of your meager expectations. It’s better to treat every child as if he or she has hidden talents, Donnellan warned, because if you do the opposite, what happens if you’re wrong? Assuming competence was the founding principle of Crossley’s method. But her work would not become widely known until a Syracuse professor of education named Douglas Biklen visited Crossley’s Melbourne clinic in 1988. He described that trip — along with a second one a few months later — in a bombshell paper for The Harvard Educational Review in August 1990. The implications were enormous, Biklen wrote. Those who had been categorized as having among the ‘‘lowest’’ intellectual capacities could now tell the world they existed; they could say, as he put it, ‘‘We will reveal ourselves, we will show