Category Archives: disability activism

When Accommodations Conflict

23 April, 2010accessibility, disability activism, mental health, policyaccommodations, smokingabby jean

Accommodations can be difficult. Not only for an individual with a disability to identify what accommodation would be relevant or helpful for them, not only convincing whoever to implement the desired accommodation, and not only ensuring that the accommodation continues over time and doesn’t lead to resentment or punishment for the person with a disability. Here is an additional wrinkle – sometimes desired or needed accommodations conflict. What one PWD needs to accommodate her disability could not only not help another PWD, but might actually exacerbate their disability.

Let’s take an example: smoking. For some PWDs, especially those with mental illness, smoking can help ameliorate their symptoms, calm their anxiety, even help some with restoring neurochemical imbalances. The rates of smoking among people with mental illness tend to be much higher than the general population, in which about 20% of people smoke. Here is a chart of smoking rates among PWDs with mental illness:

MENTAL ILLNESS:	PERCENTAGE WHO ARE SMOKERS
Bipolar Disorder	70%
Major Depression	60%
Schizophrenia	90%
Panic Disorder	56%
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder	60%

There are lots of theories why people with mental illness smoke. At a recent meditation seminar, the instructor was modeling deep breathing techniques for relaxation and stress reduction. He pointed out that the deep breaths, with an exhale longer than the inhale, breathing from the abdomen, exactly mimicked the breathing of a smoker while inhaling from a cigarette and exhaling smoke. I know people who took up smoking intentionally and specifically in order to help regulate breathing during panic attacks – they report that the 5-7 minutes of regulated breathing during one cigarette is enough to get them through a panic or anxiety attack.

Nicotine, the active ingredient in cigarettes, also acts as a stimulant on the brain. Some report enhanced attention, focus, and concentration, which can be helpful for people with attention or focus problems caused either by their disorders or the medications that treat them. As one study reports: “Certain thinking patterns are affected in schizophrenia including sustained attention, focused attention, working memory, short-term memory, recognition memory and even processes that are preattentive (eg reflexes). Some studies have suggested that there may be improvements in these areas after treatment with nicotine.” Those authors theorize, as have many others, that “it may be that patients “self medicate” to remediate the chemical imbalance in the brain (dopamine hypofunction in the pre-frontal cortex) which may help with certain difficulties with thinking tasks involving this PFC area and might explain why there is smoking persistence in schizophrenia.”

On the flip side, of course, there are many PWD for whom being around smokers or smoke will exacerbate their disabilities and a necessary accommodation is an atmosphere free from smoke. People with asthma and other respiratory problems or people with allergies and chemical sensitivities could be seriously harmed by being around smoke or people who are smoking, and could require an accommodation to be free from smoke exposure.

This sets up the possibility that there could be two PWDs – let’s say one with schizophrenia and one with severe smoke allergies – who require accommodations that are directly conflicting with each other. These situations are much trickier for me than when a PWD is requesting an accommodation that an employer, business, government, or other entity is saying is too difficult or expensive to implement. In those situations, I believe the accommodation rights of the PWD should trump that concern in the vast majority of cases. But handling issues of conflicting accommodations can be much more complicated, because the rule of “you must accommodate PWDs” doesn’t give us any guidance on how to proceed.

This is just one example of desired or needed accommodations that can directly conflict, but there are many others. How do you think these situations should be handled? Have you run into conflicts like this in your own life?

Note: discussions of conflicting accommodations – including the example discussed above – can become very charged and very personal, as readers and commenters may have personal preferences or needs on which accommodation to implement. Please be respectful of the needs of other PWDs in this comment thread. Specifically, comments that imply or state that smokers are inherently evil or people who don’t smoke are inherently intolerant (or similarly bright line rules) will be deleted.

Bullying – How Can We Stop It?

22 April, 2010age, disability activism, justice, news, policy, violenceabby jean

Here’s another horrific story of bullying, this coming out of Dickson, Oklahoma.

Austin Avery was born prematurely and suffered developmental issues as a result. Last week, when the school called [his mother] Sharlene, she knew something was seriously wrong. “We had a call from the school to come pick him up cause he was hallucinating. I just don’t understand why your child goes to school and comes home in a drunken stupor,” says Avery. So, she put him in the car and drove to the emergency room. That’s when doctors told her something she never imagined. “The doctor said that [Austin] was way over the legal limit [for alcohol]. Now, can you imagine a 14-year-old child and what kind of damage that can do to his brain?”

The investigation yielded a report from a fellow student, who reported that bullies had been putting Germ-X, an alcohol-based hand sanitizer, in Austin’s milk at lunchtime. This had been occurring regularly since January, without detection by the school or any adult in a position to discipline the bullies.

There are a couple things of note about this story. First is that it got virtually no coverage – I saw it only because I read several hip-hop gossip sites that picked the story up because the child is African-American. Other than those sites, I found absolutely no mention of it anywhere on the web other than the initial report from a local news outlet, quoted above. Intentionally poisoning a child with hand sanitizer seems like a pretty big deal to me – there could have been much more significant and detrimental side effects than alcohol intoxication, and even alcohol intoxication is dangerous enough when we’re talking about a 14 year old with developmental disabilities.

The second thing of note about this story is that Oklahoma already has an extremely robust anti-bullying law and state policy aimed at eliminating bullying. A watchdog anti-bulling group gives the Oklahoma law an A, indicating it is “near perfect” by their standards. Here is a description of their anti-bullying law:

Requires Safe School Committees to give special attention to bullying, incidents of unwanted physical or verbal aggression and sexual harassment and make recommendations. Encourages community involvement, one-on-one student/staff relationships, use of problem solving teams of counselors and/or school psychologists and requires the review of bullying prevention programs utilized by other states, agencies or school districts. Requires each school district to have policies addressing the prevention of bullying and education about bullying behavior.

So – given that all those rules, policies, requirements, and education were insufficient to stop Austin from being regularly and consistently poisoned for almost four months – how can we realistically address and stop this kind of bullying from happening? How can we provide meaningful protection for children with disabilities? Is it possible to do so through laws and regulations, or will only a long term shift in ableist attitudes be effective?

Idaho Revises State Laws to Remove Ableist Language

13 April, 2010disability activism, justice, language, news, politicsIdahoabby jean

Exciting news! On March 29th, Governor C.L. Otter signed a law removing ableist language from Idaho’s state code. From the Idaho Statesman:

The new law replaces outdated language in 73 different laws – including those addressing health and welfare, education and corrections – with more accepted phrases such as “intellectually disabled.”

Disability rights advocates said the revisions send a message to regular Idahoans that their government doesn’t tolerate disrespect, since words like retarded are used, especially among teenagers, to insult others or describe distaste. Officials in several other states, including Washington and Oregon, have enacted similar laws.

Here are a few examples of changes made by the law (from the bill text of Senate Bill 1330, available here)

A law giving interpreters to people appearing in court or witnesses in court cases says interpreters will be given to anyone “who does not understand or speak the English language, or who has a physical handicap which prevents him from fully hearing or speaking the English language.” The word “handicap” has been changed to “disability.”
A law ordering criminals on probation or parole to pay for the cost of supervision allows exemptions if “the offender has an employment handicap, as determined by a physical, psychological, or psychiatric examination.” The term “an employment handicap” has been changed to “a disability affecting employment.”
A law requiring fire safety plans and procedures defines an ‘institution’ as including “facilities for the mentally ill or mentally handicapped.” The description now reads “facilities for people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities.”

On one hand, this isn’t a huge change, and it can be argued that these are cosmetic changes when people with disabilities would be better served by changes to the actual laws, not just their wording. But I believe removing this ableist language from the official law of the state is a meaningful step to take. Governor Otter made a statement when signing this law:

Otter compared words like retarded to racial slurs Americans used during World War II to describe Japanese people.

“We refer to people as Asians now, as Japanese,” he said. “During the Second World War, we always used the most derogatory terms that were possible at that point. It suggested the anger in our society at Pearl Harbor.”

What an amazing quote! It’s clear recognition that ableist language like “retarded” in a state law is simply codifying oppression. Removing those words is an important achievement.

No, It’s Not As Easy As You Think

1 April, 2010accessibility, autonomy, class issues, disability activism, justice, politics, social attitudes, Uncategorizedabby jean

When I talk to people in the United States about disability and the need for accommodations, I am usually met with a bit of bewilderment. “You mean there’s still more work to be done on accommodations? I thought all that had been taken care of.” These are people who are used to seeing wheelchair ramps at the entrance to government buildings, used to seeing the hand switch for wheelchair users to open automatic doors, used to seeing the braille at the ATMs. Given their observations of those existing accommodations and a minimal awareness of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that mandates those accommodations, they assume that there’s been a consensus on the need to provide accommodations, a law mandating those agreed-on accommodations, and general compliance with that law.

As we well know, that is far from the truth. None of those assumptions are as true or are interpreted as broadly as people tend to assume. There is no general consensus on the need to provide accommodations for the broad range of disabilities that exist – there is general agreement that people who use wheelchairs should have access to government buildings, but there is nothing even close to general agreement on how to accommodate people with depression or even whether depression is a disability “deserving” of accommodation. The US does have a law mandating accommodations – but there are not equivalents in every country and there are significant holes in the ADA itself, often putting the burden of requesting accommodations and demonstrating a need for them on the person with a disability. Finally, the idea that agencies and businesses affirmatively comply with the ADA, obviating the need for enforcement, is just patently false.

A recent federal court decision in underlines all of these realities. In 2005, the American Council of the Blind filed a lawsuit against the Social Security Administration (SSA) “to compel SSA to provide alternative formats of communication that would enable [people with visual impairments] to have more equal access to participate in SSA programs.” (Court documents and information available through DREDEF’s site.) It took until 2009 for a court to agree and order SSA that it is required to issue notices to people with visual impairments in a format they can read – in Braille, large print, e-mail that can be read by a screen reader, computer disks, or audiotape recordings.

This lawsuit undercuts each of the assumptions above. First, there is clearly not consensus on providing accommodations, even to what would be considered a relatively “easy” impairment to accommodate – it is easy to anticipate the functional difficulties that a person with a visual impairment would encounter when presented with a written notice. A lot of these people – 250,000 of them – are getting benefits from SSA specifically because they have a visual impairment, so they’ve given SSA extensive documentation of those impairments and information on the functional limitations caused by the impairments. A much larger group – about 3 million in total – get retirement benefits from SSA. At any rate, SSA knows that these people have visual impairments and has detailed information on how those impairments affect them. And it still has not provided accommodations.

But what about the second assumption – there’s the ADA, right? It turns out that the SSA is not subject to the requirements of the ADA! The ADA applies only to state and local governments and agencies that receive federal funding – it does not apply to federal agencies such as SSA. (Raise your hand if you knew that – few people do!) The only disability rights law that applies is a precursor to the ADA, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. While the requirements regarding accommodations from government agencies are largely similar, the Rehabilitation Act does provide limited rights in comparison to the ADA.

It’s also very clear that the SSA – despite being the primary provider of cash and medical benefits for people with disabilities – did not consider that it had any obligation to provide accommodations. When individual plaintiffs with visual disabilities requested that they be given notices in alternative formats, they were simply told that no other formats were available. This included notices to which people must respond within 10 days or risk losing their benefits. Even when they were initially sued in 2005, SSA argued that the Rehabilitation Act “did not even apply” to the issue of notices to people with visual impairments. Similarly, SSA did not consider itself obligated to let benefits recipients know that they had accommodation rights under the Rehabilitation Act and laying out a process for them to request and enforce those rights.

The result of the litigation is that SSA is now required to develop a procedure to 1) notify benefits recipients of their rights to accommodations for visual impairments and 2) provide notices in alternative formats when recipients request them. Which is certainly a good thing – but one that I would simply expect from a government agency that administers disability benefits, rather than having to be ordered by a federal court after 5 years of litigation. And if accommodations that are this common sense, from a federal agency set up to deal with people with disabilities, are so hard to obtain and enforce, that demonstrates how very far we are from a society where PWDs are meaningfully accommodated.

Happy Cesar Chavez Day!

31 March, 2010class issues, disability activism, intersectionality, justice, poverty, race, workabby jean

Here in California, today is an official State holiday to celebrate the life and work of Cesar Chavez. Chavez worked to promote and enforce the civil rights of farm workers and, with Dolores Huerta, was cofounder of the United Farm Workers of America, or UFW – still one of the United States’ two major union umbrellas. While his work is usually viewed through the lens of organizing for Latinos, there is a significant disability component to his work.

Migrant farm workers are affected by a number of intersecting a complex factors which negatively affect their health and put them at risk of becoming permanently disabled through their work. They are likely to be exposed to harmful chemicals or dangerous work situations and because they often live on the farm under the control of the farm owner, they have little access to health care. This is all complicated by the immigration status – or lack of – of the workers. Here’s a brief overview of the occupational hazards, from the National Center for Farmworker Health:

The agriculture industry is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States. While farmworkers face workplace hazards similar to those found in other industrial settings, such as working with heavy machinery and hard physical labor, they also face unique occupational hazards including pesticide exposure, skin disorders, infectious diseases, lung problems, hearing and vision disorders, and strained muscles and bones. Lack of access to quality medical care makes these risks even greater for the three million migrant and seasonal farmworkers who work in the fields every year.

In 2007, for every 100,000 agricultural workers in the U.S. there were 25.7 occupational deaths in agriculture. This compares to an average rate of 3.7 deaths for every 100,000 workers in all other industries during this same year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention label agriculture the most dangerous industry for young workers in the United States, accounting for 42 percent of all work-related fatalities of young workers between 1992 and 2000. Fifty percent of these victims were younger than 15 years old.

During their daily work, farmworkers are often exposed to pesticides. A 2002 study examined take-home organophosphorus pesticide exposure among agricultural workers and found pesticides in dust samples from 85% of farmworkers’ homes and 87% of farmworkers had pesticides in dust samples in their vehicles. In addition, 88% of farmworker children had organophosphate metabolites in their urine.

Infectious diseases among the farmworker population are caused by poor sanitation and crowded conditions at work and housing sites, including inadequate washing and drinking water. Farmworkers are six times more likely to develop tuberculosis when compared with other workers, and rates of positive TB results between 17% and 50% have been reported throughout the United States.

Because farm labor consists of constant bending, twisting, carrying heavy items, and repetitive motions during long work hours, farmworkers often experience musculoskeletal injuries. Furthermore, workers are often paid piece-rate, which provides an incentive to work at high speed and to skip recommended breaks. From 1999 to 2004, almost 20 percent of farmworkers reported musculoskeletal injuries.

Another complicating factor is the prevalence of child labor on these farms. It is obviously difficult to quantify this phenomenon, but worldwide, approximately 132 million kids between the ages of 5 and 14 work in agriculture. In the United States, somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 children do agricultural work, sometimes working 12 or even 14 hour days. Environmental pollutants like pesticides have greater effects on children and their growing bodies are often at greater risk of harm from musculoskeletal and other injuries.

The punishing nature of this work is well known and acknowledged by government agencies. The Social Security Administration, which provides cash benefits and medical coverage to individuals it determines are “permanently disabled,” has a special category for “the worn-out worker.” This is a provision specifically for someone with less than a 6th grade education who, after 35+ years of arduous manual labor, can no longer return to that previous employment. The most common example of someone who fits this category is a migrant farm worker – someone who worked in orange orchards, climbing ladders, carrying heavy boxes of fruit, whose body has simply broken down and can no longer sustain that arduous labor.

There are three million workers currently in the fields, including a significant number of children, for whom this is the expected outcome – if they manage to sustain their labor for thirty five years. Cesar Chavez fought for those people and fought to protect them from outcomes and conditions that were, in his time, even worse and more damaging than what I’ve described above. We now must continue his fight.

Si Se Puede!

Stigma Kills: A Concrete Example

29 March, 2010activism, disability activism, justice, language, make the world a better place, media and pop culture, mental health, normality, othering, social attitudes, Uncategorized, violenceabby jean

Often when bloggers or activists push back against ableist language and stereotypes in the media, especially pop culture, someone will respond with an argument that there are more important disability issues to address and that the topic at hand is mostly irrelevant to disability rights as a whole. This has happened with each of the posts in the Ableist Word Profile series, it’s happened with discussion about ableist tropes in pop culture, it’s happened when critiquing the vast overrepresentation of criminal behavior in news coverage of people with mental illness.

I believe these things matter very much. Perhaps not individually – if I slip and use the word “lame” pejoratively, it does not automatically cause a person with a disability to die instantly. But each individual instance adds up to become a trend, to become a larger understanding and expectation of how things are. And if those understandings and expectations aren’t accurate, it can have dramatically horrific results.

This is because a lot of our ongoing decisionmaking is done automatically, unconsciously. This is because we are constantly presented with such a vast amount of information that if we stopped to consciously evaluate everything, we’d never be able to do anything at all. When I see an object with keys labeled with letters and laid out in the QWERTY design, I recognize it as a keyboard an assume I use it to manually input written data into a computer or typewriter or phone or other device. This saves me the trouble of figuring out each and every time what this object is, what it is for, how I am supposed to interact with it, and what end result I can expect. I do this instantly, even though it is immensely complicated – it has been extraordinarily difficult to program a computer to identify, say, a keyboard from a photo or video, regardless of lighting, angle, and lots of other variables that the brain can process almost instantly.

There are similar examples for evaluating other sensory input. When I touch something, I know instantly and without consciously considering it whether the object is solid or liquid, dry or wet. I have no idea how I make that evaluation and instructing someone else on making that judgment would be immensely difficult for me – but when my foot touches a wet patch of carpet en route to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I pull my foot back lightning fast to avoid what is surely cat puke. If I feel myself losing balance, I put out a hand to catch myself without consciously deciding to, because my classification of my sensations as “losing balance” was done entirely unconsciously.

How does stigma fit into this? Well, a stereotype is an unconscious cognitive shortcut – instead of examining an individual person or situation, we apply a stereotype to make assumptions. While a stereotype is usually seen as a negative thing, they serve an important purpose by allowing us to make educated guesses. For example, when I go into a fast food restaurant, I know to go to the counter and give my order to someone behind the counter, usually wearing a uniform. While this has held true at the places I’ve visited in the past, if I go to an new fast food restaurant that I haven’t visited before, I will assume that I use the same procedure. That’s a useful assumption that saves me the time and energy of approaching each situation as brand new and unrelated.

There are times when stereotypes can be harmful and damaging, as we well know. The stigma against PWDs is an assumption applied to all PWDs simply because they are PWDs, assuming they have a set of presumed characteristics, motivations, and beliefs. It is a stereotype composed of all the understandings and expectations of PWDs conveyed by all the little things – the word choices of the people you talk to, that one character in that on tv show, that story you saw on the news last night. And although the specifics fade away, most people are left with vague, unconscious associations. Again, some of these associations are essentially value-neutral, as how I generally associate red with “stop” and green with “go” from traffic lights and signs. But people can also have unconscious associations around more complex and problematic issues, like race, gender, and disability status.

Social psychologists from Harvard developed a computer-based test to measure the existence of implicit associations and stereotypes – the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT asks users to rapidly categorize words to the left or right of the screen. From the IAT FAQ:

The IAT asks you to pair two concepts (e.g., young and good, or elderly and good). The more closely associated the two concepts are, the easier it is to respond to them as a single unit. So, if young and good are strongly associated, it should be easier to respond faster when you are asked to give the same response (i.e. the ‘E’ or ‘I’ key [to indicate left or right]) to these two. If elderly and good are not so strongly associated, it should be harder to respond fast when they are paired. This gives a measure of how strongly associated the two types of concepts are. The more associated, the more rapidly you should be able to respond. The IAT is one method for measuring implicit or automatic attitudes and is featured on this website. There are other methods, using different procedures, that have been investigated in laboratory studies.

I’ve taken a number of IATs before (because I’m dorky about cognitive science and this kind of stuff) and believe that they have correctly identified in me some negative unconscious associations. For example, I unconsciously associated women with home and family and men with business. Consciously, I strongly disagree with that association! So when I do consciously consider my assumptions about those associations, I override and reject my unconscious associations.

When researching this post, I took the IAT that measures unconscious associations around disability. (I can’t link directly to that test, but it can be found in the IAT demonstrations available here.) Taking the test, I found that I have a slight automatic preference for abled people over PWDs. This doesn’t mean that when I act, speak, or even think about these issues I exhibit that preference. It doesn’t mean that I “really” prefer TABs to PWDs. It means that I have been sufficiently inundated by messages that associate TABs with “good” and PWDs with “bad” that I have a slight unconscious tendency to apply that association, a tendency almost instantaneously overruled by my conscious thought. So it is an association that exists only for the tiniest of moments until it is extinguished by cognition.

How can those tiny moments, almost too small to measure, even matter? Well, as Chally recently posted about, a Los Angeles police officer shot and killed an unarmed man with an unspecific cognitive disability autism [1. ETA since his family disclosed that he had autism in numerous public interviews.]. The officer fired as the man reached towards his waistband after failing to respond to verbal commands from the police. From the LA Times article linked in the post:

[LAPD Officers] Corrales and Diego believed “he [the PWD] was arming himself” and fired, Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger said at an afternoon news conference.

“The officers made decisions in a fraction of a second,” he added.

In a fraction of a second.

Just long enough for the unconscious association to spark but not long enough for conscious thought to override it.

Just long enough for stigma to kill.

For Cereal, Stars and Stripes? Mocking “Paranoia” is Headline-Worthy?

18 March, 2010activism, class issues, disability activism, For Cereal?, military, shaming, social attitudesableism, abuse, mental illness, military, news media, problematic attitudes, social treatment, Stars and Stripes NewspaperOuyang Dan

OK, so I saw this one in my paper edition because I get it the night before (and technically a day late, since I am in the future!), but you can find it online too.

In the 16 March edition of Stars and Stripes writer Jeff Schogol wrote an article containing letters from people who sent letters to the Defense Department website. He calls the letters he said the DoD provided to him “the more bizarre feedback it gets” and notes that “[t]he authors’ names were withheld, but all spelling, grammar and paranoia are authentic“. (emphasis mine)

The article, titled “Airborne bears to catch bin Laden and other letters to the Pentagon” seems little more than a great way to laugh at people for myriad reasons. Let’s poke fun at their lack of intelligence! See how they can’t construct proper sentences? Those silly people without proper educations and who aren’t newspaper columnists or Pentagon officials! Ha ha! That’s so funny!

There were several letters published by Jeff Schogol in his article that I don’t feel comfortable publishing here, because I don’t feel that it is proper to display these letters that were meant to be private correspondence and won’t further his ableism. I don’t want to further hurt a person who might already be pained by finding hir something they never meant to have public spattered all over the internet and a military wide newspaper. They were not meant for this type of dissemination, and I think it was vile of whichever Pentagon employee thought it was appropriate to release them to a newspaper. I also don’t feel that it is in good taste to print a letter in a newspaper with the intention of laughing at the “crazy” person, as it is clear here that is what is meant. We are supposed to have a good chuckle at the supposed ludicrous ideas that are put forth by the letter writers. Schogol obviously feels that it is OK to call people paranoid and make light of mental illness and disability. Har har.

I am going to invite you to write to Jeff Schogol at Stars and Stripes and let him know that you don’t think it was a great idea to run this article, or that it was in good taste to reprint these letters. Or if you feel inspired, maybe you would like to use the same venue as the original letter writers who thought that they were writing private correspondence to the DoD, and let them know just how unprofessional it was to release those emails to a newspaper for a chuckle.

Yeah, what about your free speech “rights”?

17 March, 2010activism, class issues, disability activism, global, i'm right here, intersectionality, justice, language, meta, normality, othering, social attitudesactivism, blog, bloggers, blogging, comments, comments policy, communication, derailing, first amendment, free speech, global, internet, Internet use, it's about you, language, law, myths and misconceptions, privilege, privilege-check, problematic attitudes, representation, rights, USAAnnaham

Here at FWD, it is not unusual for us to get quite a few comments in mod that question, take issue with, or outright berate our fairly rigorous comments policy and iterations thereof in varying degrees. Many of these comments are some variation of “But what about my right to express my opinion?” or “But…free speech!”

Unsurprisingly, many of the comments that try to take us to task for “prohibiting” free speech are from non-regular (and, in some cases, first-time) commenters. I try to give people — on the internet and off — the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps these folks who try to direct the conversation to their supposed right to say whatever they want “because of the First Amendment” are just unaware that many social justice-focused blogs — especially those written by people who are members of various marginalized and/or traditionally underrepresented groups — have commenting policies, usually for very specific reasons. Perhaps they think that the First Amendment entitles them to say whatever they want without also getting called on it. Perhaps they think that bigoted or hateful speech is okay, since it’s “just” on the internet and therefore cannot be taken seriously or do any “real” damage. Perhaps they think that someone needs to pay Devil’s advocate when talking to (or about) disabled feminists and other people who do not represent (or are not represented by) the majority, and they are reasonable/intellectual enough to do the job!

Here’s the thing: This website is not run by U.S. government or employees of the U.S. government who are representing their place of work. This is a privately-owned website. Its contributors, commenters and readers are not all from or living in the U.S. The First Amendment applies, by and large, to the United States government’s attempts to contain and/or regulate things that people say or opinions that they want to express in myriad formats. In other words, “freedom of expression” does not automatically mean that you can bust out with some bigoted crap, and then whine or call foul when the blogger or author chooses not to publish or engage with said bigoted crap, or when someone else (perhaps another commenter) calls you on this crap. Free speech is not equivalent to some sort of magical blogular free-for-all. The “free speech!!11” defense (if you want to call it that) also has the unintentional side effect of privileging US-centric notions of being able to say certain things, apparently without consequence — something that some other countries do not appear to take so lightly (see, for example, British libel laws).

From a more anecdata-ish perspective, I have noticed that many of the people, at least on the internet, who cry “free speech!!1” in defense of their supposed right to say “un-PC” things/play Devil’s advocate/et cetera are people with various kinds of privilege (white, heterosexual, abled, cis, class–to name just a few) who simply do not seem to want to give up — or, sadly even so much as critically examine — one or more of the types of unearned privilege that they have. Put simply, they just want to shut people (who oftentimes aren’t just like them for one reason or another) up using the trump card of free speech. It seems to me that the thought process might go a little something like this: Who cares if there’s a person (or people) on the other side of that computer screen? I have the right to steamroll over their lived experiences, or tell them how wrong they are ’cause “normal” people don’t feel this way, or tell them to suck it up/grow a thicker skin, or that they’re just making things up so they can be angry about stuff, or looking for stuff to get mad about, or seeing things that “aren’t there” (because if I can’t see it, it must not be there!) or use any number of derailing tactics that are not pertinent to the actual discussion at hand, or direct the discussion to my experiences and feelings as a privileged/non-marginalized person and thus re-center my own (and the majority’s) importance in a discussion that is not even about me, because it’s within my FREE SPEECH!!1 rights to do all of this and more!

Boy, that must be really fun, getting to justify making things all about you and your “rights” all of the time in spaces that are run by people who are — gasp! — different than you, and who may not have much of a safe ‘net space anyway, since the entire web is full of people who probably share at least some of your oh-so-contrarian outlook on things (not to mention some of your privilege[s]).

The free-speechers also tend to miss one important thing: If they want to spew uninformed, privilege-encrusted opinions using this excuse, and their comment gets published publicly, it is perfectly within reason for bloggers, writers and other commenters to use their free speech “rights” to respond right back.

Oh Canada: This week in Canada & Disability

16 March, 2010anna rants, autonomy, bodies, disability activism, invisibility, representations, televisionableism, accessibility, barriers to access, canada, disability, exclusion, politicians, politics, social inclusion, social treatmentAnna

It’s been an interesting week or so in Canada regarding issues around disability. “Interesting” here means hit and miss.

I could, for example, direct you to the coverage of the Paralymic Games, but that site appears to be inaccessible to screen readers. It’s very busy, and has a lot of flash on it. There’s an audio slide show – the first I’ve ever come across – but you need to download something in order to run the audio.

So, hit and miss there, I guess.

Of course, then we get this story: No sugar-coating for disability exhibit: Co-curator’s trip out west parallels struggle to overcome obstacles in Out from Under

For disability rights activist Catherine Frazee, the personal overlaps with the political even when she doesn’t intend it.

That happened with Frazee’s recent journey to Vancouver from Toronto for Out From Under, a unique exhibition on the social history of disability in Canada.

As one of its three curators, she felt it was important to be here for the exhibition’s opening during the Paralympic Winter Games.

Frazee, the director of Ryerson’s Institute for Disability Studies, can’t fly for medical reasons having to do with living with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic neuromuscular disease characterized by the degeneration of the motor neurons. When she travels, she is accompanied by an attendant and Patricia Seeley, her life partner.

The only option for her was to take the train.

Frazee was willing to make sacrifices to travel out west, such as sleeping in her electric wheelchair. She can’t be separated from her wheelchair, which is uniquely customized to her body’s needs. At times, for example, she has to tilt it slightly back to help with her breathing.

When she contacted Via Rail, she was told that she and her wheelchair had to travel separately.

Of course she was. *headdesk*

The exhibit itself sounds amazing and I wish I could see it. But it’s telling to me that in my country, where politicians regularly tell me they really care about the needs of people with disabilities, it’s impossible for Catherine Frazee to travel to Vancouver. Ultimately, she and her partner traveled through the US, where the Americans with Disabilities Act, as poor as it may be, still required that there be train cars that Frazee be able to use.

Or another hit and a miss: Promoting rights of disabled new foreign policy focus: Cannon

Promoting the rights of disabled people around the world will become a key foreign policy focus for Canada, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said at the United Nations Thursday.

Cannon made the declaration after delivering Canada’s ratification of the world body’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Awwww. Isn’t that awesome?

Meanwhile our Prime Minister held a TalkCanada event that was inaccessible to blind or partially sighted people.

Yesterday morning Prime Minister Stephen Harper performed a first, by being the first Canadian Prime Minister to have his remarks streamed live through YouTube. Before and after the PM’s speech, and up until Sunday at 1:00pm ET, Canadians can login to the Talk Canada YouTUbe page to submit and vote on questions, which the PM will answer in another live stream on Tuesday.

As a completely blind Canadian and an Information and Communications Technology Accessibility Consultant (I help make information systems work for persons with disabilities), I take exception to the PM using technologies such as YouTube and Google Moderator (used for the questions and voting). These technologies were poorly accessible to me, and to other blind and partially sighted Canadians, including Derek Wilson who wrote about the barriers he faced. This is not the way that things need to be, it would have been very possible, should the PM have cared, to make the Talk Canada event easily accessible to a much wider range of Canadians, including the blind and visually impaired.

[I also have no idea if the actual videos will be subtitled, Signed, or a transcript provided.]

Oh, and Canada continues to refuse immigrants when family members have disabilities. The only ‘hit’ there is that we’re talking about it, I guess, since it’s been going on forever.

I’m frustrated. Politicians, business owners, school officials, everyone tells me that they really care about the needs of people with disabilities. They often do grand gestures: Ooh, we’ll show highlights from the Paralympic Games! We’ll agree that yes, we’re going to support the needs and rights of people with disabilities in other countries! We’re going to put in a Student Accessibility Services Office (because all people with disabilities on campus are students) and that will solve all the problems!

What we won’t do, apparently, is ensure that people with disabilities in Canada can get from Nova Scotia to Vancouver with minimal fuss and drama, like the currently non-disabled can. We won’t discuss how inaccessible politicians are to people with disabilities. We will express disdain that the laws in Ontario now require universities to be accessible to students before students spend months or even years self-advocating. We will approve bursaries for students purchasing equipment that helps them write their essays and do their school work in February – 6 months into the Academic year.

Oh Canada. Please do better.

FWD/Forward

FWD (feminists with disabilities) for a way forward

Category Archives: disability activism

When Accommodations Conflict

Bullying – How Can We Stop It?

Recommended Reading for April 20, 2010

Idaho Revises State Laws to Remove Ableist Language

Happy Cesar Chavez Day!