Category Archives: make the world a better place

Quick Press: Action For Access

Passed along to me via email is this downloadable and printable survey, Action for Access.

You go to the website, and follow the instructions for download. The survey can be taken to locations on the map, then matched up (to my understanding) with the online version, to rate local businesses and establishments in the UK on their accessibility.

There are instructions for following up on the information you provide.

If anyone is interested, or has tried this survey and followed up on it, I would be interested to know how successful they found it (or even how accessible they found the survey itself).

What a Lovely Surprise

I was recently reminded of the importance of noticing, appreciating, and celebrating “good disability moments” – those times when someone responds to me or treats me in a non-ableist way. This is more than the lack of discrimination or oppression, this is someone treating me as I want to be treated. Although these moments aren’t as routine as I would like them to be, they certainly come along, and I think it’s important to remind myself that not everyone will respond to my disability negatively or with fear or anger. Another side benefit is demonstrating how easy it is for people to act with compassion and caring on disability issues.

I read a post at Rolling Around that highlighted a recent “good moment”:

A Wheel-trans driver just came to pick up one of our members (a bit late, but understandable). While loading the member onto the bus, this driver took the opportunity to have a conversation with our member (she didn’t even realize that I was there). This member has a profound disability, he’s also blind and can’t answer back verbally. She spoke to him with kindness throughout the loading procedure, reassuring him he was going home, letting him know what she was doing and she was joking around with him. This driver has a huge heart and smile and made sure that no matter how stressed she was feeling due to traffic, she didn’t let that ruin someone else’s day. Too often people with disabilities are passed off and are not seen as “normal human beings” that have emotions and feelings. It’s a wonderful thing to see it when someone takes time out of their day to talk to members, be friendly, maintain professionalism and make someone smile with such a simple act of kindness.

I recently had a “good moment” of my own. I was at work, eating lunch with a few of my co-worker friends, people who know my disability status and whom I trust enough to feel comfortable discussing my disability issues. I mentioned how I had seen a lot of recent articles about lithium mining, spurred by the recent discovery of huge lithium deposits in Afghanistan, which prompted lots of articles analyzing lithium mining industries in Bolivia, and so on. I laughed that every time I see one of these articles, I have to consciously remind myself that the lithium they’re getting is to use in electronics and industry and that it isn’t being mined for pharmaceutical reasons. Partway through the story, I realized that one of my newer co-workers was sitting with us and remembered that I had not discussed my disability status with her, so continuing my story would basically be outing myself to her, but I was so far into it I couldn’t stop without also calling attention to my disability status. So I plunged ahead, saying that my reaction to those headlines is always to think “I don’t need that many pills! You all can stop mining the stuff now! I’m all set! Thanks!”

New co-worker laughed at the punchline and then the conversation moved on to other things. She didn’t stop the conversation to say, “wait, you’re on lithium? Isn’t that for crazy people?” or any other questions. She didn’t ask me what I take it for. She didn’t ask me anything, in fact, but continued to chat and laugh with me and the others with absolutely no change or shift at all. Since then, she’s continued to treat me exactly the same as before – griping about World Cup officiating, wondering if the A/C in our office will ever work reliably – and hasn’t mentioned or questioned my disability issues at all.

It is difficult to say how much this means to me. The ability to talk about myself, to share those jokes, without encountering negativity, curiosity, or even stares, made me feel like my disability did not set me apart from the group. That mentioning my medication in that context was equally mundane and non-notable as mentioning I have a cat, or drive a Honda, or don’t like beets. It was the feeling of acceptance. Of equality. And it was amazing.

Call to Action: Tell Parliament to Stop Discrimination against people with disabilities who immigrate to Canada

An awesome way to guarantee that you will not be allowed to immigrate to most countries – even if you otherwise completely qualify – is to have a disability, or have a disabled immediate family member.

Despite the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms explicitly guaranteeing that laws in Canada cannot be written to discriminate against people with “mental or physical disabilities” (Section 15 of the Charter), Canada’s Immigration Act allows someone who otherwise passes all of Canada’s immigration requirements to be denied immigration because they “might reasonably be expected to cause excessive demand on health or social services”.

What has this meant in practice? Well, in 2009 Chris Mason, an immigrant from the UK who was injured on the job while working legally in Canada, was deported back to the UK because of his disability. In 2010, Ricardo Companioni was initially denied immigration to Canada from the US because of his HIV-positive status, but managed to argue in Federal court that he and his partner would pay for their drug treatments and thus not be part of Canada’s care system – a solution that is not available to many people. In May, the Barlagne family lost their appeal to be allowed to stay in Canada, as their youngest daughter has Cerebral Palsy. The reasoning was that the court did not believe the Barlagnes would be able to pay for their daughter’s care.

None of these stories are unique. Even when the Bill was being debated in Parliament, Members were bringing up concerns about how the “excessive demand clause” would affect people whose families had disabilities. In 2000, when Wendy Lill, a Member of Parliament, asked:

We have a charter of rights which talks about each Canadian being entitled to equality under the law. The Will to Act Task Force, which was established several years ago, talked about equality of citizenship for persons with disabilities.

Clause 34 talks about how a foreign national or other permanent resident would be inadmissible on health grounds if their health condition might reasonably be expected to cause excessive demand on health or social services. This is the only clause in the bill which seems to me would in any way relate to a person with a disability making an application to come to Canada.

I would like to know if a family with a child who has a disability such as Down syndrome or cerebral palsy would be accepted in this country. [emphasis added]

She was assured by the then-in-power Liberals that:

I think it is internationally accepted, in the Geneva convention and other statutes, that the best interests of the child can indeed be defined. In the case of a disabled child, I believe that the intent is to prevent abuse. The abuse might be that the only reason for someone wanting to come to Canada would be to seek free health care of some type.

However, in the case of family reunification, if we are talking about bringing a new family to Canada, if a child has a disability, frankly, I am absolutely confident, having met the men and women who work in citizenship and immigration, that we would take all of that into account and we would not allow it to stand in the way. [emphasis added]

I’m very happy for the no-longer-in-power Liberals that they were certain situations like the Barlagnes would never happen in Totally-Awesome-To-People-With-Disabilities Canada, but since we live in this Canada, I think their optimism was misguided. As has been amply demonstrated by reality.

The Council of Canadians with Disabilities has recently written yet-another-letter urging the Hon. Jason Kenney, Minister of Immigration, to review the “excessive demand clause”. You can read the letter in full at their website.

I have adapted their letter to send to Mr Kenney, as well as my MP, and provide that letter for my fellow Canadians to adapt or use in any way they see fit.

This is a discriminatory policy. People with disabilities and their families are not drains on the Canadian economy. We are people, and we should not be denied equal rights because of our disabilities.

My letter is below:
Continue reading Call to Action: Tell Parliament to Stop Discrimination against people with disabilities who immigrate to Canada

BADD: Why I Write

(This was originally posted as a BADD contribution at my tumblr.)

I spend a lot of time blogging about and against ableism, about being a person with a mental illness, about the way policies and cultural attitudes and assumptions act to disadvantage people with disabilities. But for some reason, I was having a lot of trouble coming up with a topic for[BADD] . I got some good suggestions – issues of ableist language (and I’ve written in the past about the words ‘retarded’ and ‘hysterical’ and their ableist roots and effects), issues about the enormous intersection between poverty and disability (poverty leads to bad health outcomes and disability often leads to poverty, making a self-reinforcing cycle), and disability tropes in pop culture (I don’t watch family guy but have talked about 90210!).

I thought of some other topics I could address – why I see today’s immigration protests and related activism as a disability-related issues and the importance of intersectionality issues in meaningful social justice work, or even an info piece on how PWDs should take steps to prepare for emergencies such as natural disasters. but I didn’t feel excited about any of those.

So I’m going to go back to the beginning, and talk a little about why I identify as a person with a disability, why I talk about disability issues, why I’m a contributor to a blog about feminist and disabilities, why I spend so much time and emotional energy on these topics. (Which are, frankly, often personally distressing, what with all the info about how I’m going to die poor and alone.)

I write because I want things to change. I’m not always sure the writing helps me individually – it is hard to focus on these issues, to perpetually remind myself of the limitations caused by my disabilities, of the societal attitudes that assume that I am lazy and worthless and dangerous to be around, of the innumerable policies and laws that reinforce and ensure the unequal status of PWDs. And while I see the value of creating a space where other PWDs can discuss their personal circumstances and struggle and receive support instead of judgment and blame, the internet is a big enough place that I think that role is being filled, well, by lots of blogs and LiveJournal/Dreamwidth communities.

I write because I want people – both PWDs and TABs – to recognize the larger cultural and political forces that create and maintain societies that use disability as a punchline, as an insult, as a reason to keep people unemployed, poor, disempowered, and sometimes leading directly to their deaths. I want PWDs in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and other “first world” countries to understand that lobbying their governments to abandon use of land mines can directly affect the prevalence of disabilities in poorer countries like Cambodia (thanks to s.e. smith for that great post!). I want people to think about how recovery efforts in disaster-affected areas like Haiti need to include specific focus and attention on the unique and disproportionate needs of PWDs.

But for me, it’s not enough to just help people understand. I desperately want them to act. To get involved in the political process to advocate for the rights and needs of PWDs. To get involved in social justice issues as a whole, because issues affecting immigrants are going to fall heavy on immigrants with disabilities. To tease out how a national policy can and will affect PWDs in other, poorer, countries. To vote, to talk to their elected representatives, to encourage others to act.

I believe that change is possible. And I blog to facilitate, encourage, and promote that change.

Stigma Kills: A Concrete Example

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.