Yesterday I was at the Audubon. They have some raptors in rehab there. You know, the ones that can’t be released back into the wild for whatever reason… broken wings, neurological issues, blindness, and so on. There’s this Barred Owl there that I absolutely love. I love Barred Owls in general, but this one is just… I don’t know. I love them especially.
I’m sure the Audubon is doing their best by the animals, but I always feel sad when I see them in their enclosures. They’re fairly small, each bird is isolated, for safety reasons I’m sure, and they have very limited things for stimulation. The owl has some branches and perches, a box to hide in, one small rabbit stuffed animal, and some water. Again, I’m sure they’re doing their best by these animals with what resources they have, and I’m confident the logic is that this is better than releasing them and them dying in the wild, and hey, it’s a cool educational opportunity for people! Where else do you get to see such magnificent birds up close? Obviously it’s an experience I treasure. But…
This time I sat down on the ground next to the Barred Owl cage. The owl was sitting on a branch on the ground, their head rotating round and back, round and back, like a broken typewriter as they looked at me. They have some sort of neurological problem, poor babe. And I just felt so overwhelmed. I mean, life is really overwhelming in general right now. It breaks my heart so much to see people being murdered, abused, separated from their families, and others not caring or making very intricate excuses and tangled webs of arguments for not having to lift a finger. Yes, I know it’s more complex than that if you get into the minutia, but it doesn’t make the hurt in my heart any less.
I am white as fuck. I have never experienced discrimination based on my skin tone. Not once. I’m sure I have even received preferential treatment because of it. I know I will never know what that is like for people of colour, and that I don’t have to understand to give a shit and fight for their right to be alive, to be treated as equals. I don’t know what it’s like to be not white or face racial discrimination. But I have faced a LOT of hatred and discrimination because I am disabled. Also some because I am queer, but much, much more because of my disabilities. And that’s with the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) in place providing at least some level of protection and “guarantee” of access to me. But that only came into effect 30 years ago. It was passed in 1990. NINETEEN NINETY! Before that it was 100% legal to deny jobs, transportation, public accommodation, education, access to communication services, and access to government services and programs to disabled folks. Also, that “public accommodation” bit means that it was super fine and okey-dokey to continue to build and maintain absolutely inaccessible buildings, including grocery stores, post offices, government buildings, shops, and medical offices (& so much more).
It was commonplace to force/pressure disabled folks to stay permanently in their homes away from the public, or just stick us into asylums and let us rot, out of sight, out of mind, thanks to “ugly laws” which were passed in various states starting in 1881 that said that “Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares, or public places in the city, shall not therein or thereon expose himself to public view.” I’m sure that it also didn’t help that there was no employment equality, so where were we supposed to go? What were we supposed to do?
In 1960 Social Security was amended to allow for disabled people under the age of 50 to benefit. Before that, any disabled person under 50 had to be independently wealthy, have family who could care for them, or be healthy enough to still be able to work. If not, they were shit out of luck and just got to go die somewhere. In 1978 a group of 19 wheelchair users in Denver blocked a major intersection all day and all night, chanting “WE WILL RIDE!” demanding access to public transportation. This was a success, and Denver became the first city with a bus line that accommodated wheelchairs. Other cities and states followed… slowly. 1981 was the year of Poe v. Lynchburg Training School and Hospital which asked, “huh, has involuntarily sterilizing mental patients been a violation of their rights?” The court decided that it hadn’t been, and the same year Colorado concurred and, in fact, deemed it “essential.” But in 1985 the courts had a change of heart, kinda, and decided that the women who had been sterilized SHOULD BE INFORMED WHAT HAD BEEN DONE TO THEM and that they should be helped to get counseling and medical treatment. Not that it should be stopped, just that disabled “crazy” women should be told about the major, life-altering thing that had been done to them without their knowledge. Other states, like my home state of North Carolina, found differently and continued to uphold involuntary and (as far as I can tell) uninformed sterilization.
1988 was the year that the Supreme Court said that schools can’t expel a child just for being disabled. Hate crime stats weren’t even recorded against disabled people (or anyone else, yikes!) until 1990. It was a long haul of small progresses and a lot of really, truly awful shit, and good people consistently fighting back.
This is an extremely abbreviated list. Check out the Timeline of Disability Rights on Wikipedia.
There were years of petitions, protests, and more, begging, no, demanding equal access and treatment for disabled people, the largest of which was the 504-Sit In in San Francisco in 1977, which lasted 26 days! Finally, after continued pressure, protests, petitions, and more, in March of 1990 (yeah, 13 years later), after the proposed ADA passed the Senate but then stalled in the House Committee on Public Works and Transportation (now the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure), disabled folks got worried. Really understandably. What they had been fighting for for months, years, decades! - basic equality and human fucking rights - was about to be lost. That’s when the iconic Capitol Crawl happened in DC. About 500 disabled people amassed, along with over 1,000 abled protesters, in front of the White House. 60 or so brave disabled people pulled themselves from their wheelchairs, cast aside their crutches and walkers, and began pulling themselves up the steps to the capitol building on their hands and knees (in some cases, fully army-crawling up those massive stairs), demonstrating for all to see how inaccessible and absolutely unequal our society is. How much we desperately needed change. People screamed that it was “undignified” and “horrendous” and “uncivilized” that disabled people would publicly crawl and debase themselves in this manner. But they didn’t stop. They didn’t let the booing of the priviliged, those with deep-rooted internalized ableism, those who “just wanted peace,” to deter their protest. Many were arrested for this bold yet peaceful statement. This public demonstration and outcry pushed the House to pass the ADA, granting equal protections and access (kinda) to disabled people on a Federal level.
That was not only within my lifetime, but as I was discussing the other day, America has had the television show The Simpsons longer than equal rights for disabled people. Let that sink in for a minute.
And people are constantly trying to roll back ADA protections, which already aren’t sufficient. It’s a good starting point, and I’m glad that technically people can’t not hire me because I’m disabled (though people still don’t hire disabled people at an alarming rate, and just come up with other reasons for it to mask the discrimination), or can’t build a new building that I can’t access, or can’t keep me from school because of my physical or mental health, but that’s the bare fucking minimum, yo! There still isn’t marriage equality for disabled people, we still don’t have access to many places because of super lax ADA exemptions, 40-50% of police brutality is perpetrated against disabled people (who are often also of colour), far less than 10% of housing in the US is accessible compared to the 20-25% of the population who are disabled, public transit is only kind of accessible depending on where you go and what sort of access you need, and… I mean, I could go on and on and on. And we literally just got that, our basic rights, which I hear all the time that we (disabled people) need to just shut up and be thankful for. Jesus christ. If I had a dime for every time I heard that, or every time I had someone tell me how “lucky” I was to be disabled (parking permit, mostly), or how they suspect I’m faking it, or whatever other ableist garbage, I could pay all my medical bills! We don’t want special treatment, we want equality. Equity. The freedom to interact with the world like everyone else does.
Capitol Crawl, Washington DC, 1990
I sat in the dirt and talked to this owl for a while. I told them how lovely they were, how much I appreciated them, how much I loved them. How sorry I was they were stuck in this shitty cage. How hard disability is. How it does seem to mean that people pluck you out, segregate you, give you the shittiest conditions, and pat themselves on the back because “hey, at least you’re not dead!” And I cried as I looked at this enclosure and saw my own life, my future, as it is getting smaller and smaller as my disabilities get worse and worse. How limited things are, how when I do go places, the “accessible areas” are always shitty, always limited, and tucked away from everyone else. How hard it is to get in to them in the first place. They’re rarely intersectional (another topic for another day I suppose). I was sad as I thought about a BLM protest I went to in Hartford, which was beautiful! But I couldn’t go with the group as they proceeded to march down to the police station and back, because I was alone in my manual wheelchair and couldn’t self-propel that far, and the sidewalks and streets in Hartford are so bad that I knew I wouldn’t physically be able to follow the crowd, even if I had the strength to do so. Inaccessibility meant that I sat there in my chair, all alone, yelling “Black Lives Matter” “No Justice, No Peace” as the group moved away, leaving me behind.
It’s not their fault at all. The meeting place where we held the first hour and a half or so of the protest was very accessible, and I appreciated that! There was even a speaker who, when she was listing all the intersections that are harmed by racism, police brutality, and discrimination, didn’t forget us. TWICE she mentioned disabled people! It’s the fault of the system, of society. Where it’s okay for our cities to be impassable for disabled people because “eh, they can just find another way” or “do you really need to go there, though?” Where police shooting autistic, deaf, physically and mentally disabled people is commonplace. Where when we ask for access, equality, to be seen as human beings, we are told to shut up and just be grateful for what we have because we aren’t worth spending the time or money on.
I sat and cried talking to this owl for probably a good 10 minutes. I might have stayed longer if my partner and the dog hadn’t been waiting very patiently for me. I just felt this huge kinship with those suffering right now, as my people have suffered as well. And yes, there is so much intersection! It is very important to say that disabled POC and right now, specifically black disabled folks are facing extra discrimination and hardship. I’m priviliged as I’m a white bitch who is disabled. I like to think that, whether or not I had faced discrimination, I would still stand up and fight for what’s right. For civil rights. For human fucking rights for everyone. I think I’m that kind of person. But with my own experiences, that definitely adds a personal fuel to the fire for me. My heartache is not only sympathetic, but empathetic, as much as it can be.
Photo credit: Charlotte’s mother :)
My sign says :White Silence Equals White Consent. Black Lives Matter!
I don’t really have a concise take home lesson for this one; sorry. I guess if I were forced to put a point on it it might be to always acknowledge your privilege, whatever it is. Everyone has it, and not all privilige weighs the same, but it’s important to acknowledge regardless. And when you hear people, minorities specifically, crying out that they can’t breathe, saying that they are struggling, that things aren’t equal (in a civil rights way, not in a petty way), that change needs to happen, STOP. Listen. Open your ears and your heart, close your mouth, and listen. If your knee-jerk reaction to someone saying “we are fucking dying” or “we literally aren’t being treated like equal citizens” is to say “well, statistically I don’t think that’s true,” or “yeah but….” maybe it’s time for some self reflection. I’m not saying everyone has to agree with me, or come at things the same way I do. I’m just saying we all (especially white folk, especially abled folk) can benefit from some self-reflection and listening to those with less privilige. There’s a whole world of experiences out there, and ignorance isn’t bliss. It's violence. And if you’re not willing to try and make things better for everyone, especially those who are suffering the most (“The least of these,” for my Bible-y folk), what are you doing?
Black Lives Matter.
Accessibility Matters.
Happy Pride!