How Every Issue Is A Disability Justice Issue
Democratic societies under capitalism haven’t done a great job achieving justice for disabled people. As long as they fail to do so, they aren’t actually democratic. In the US, we have the best disability rights legislation in the world — the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 — and still, we fail to provide the care, accommodations, and opportunities people with disabilities need to survive, let alone thrive. The Washington Post reports that “10,000 people died waiting for a disability decision in the last year.” With the GOP’s latest tax bill, class warfare is escalating, and disability benefits, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are all on the chopping block. Cutting the Work Opportunity Tax Credit will be detrimental for people with disabilities and veterans seeking employment. At the same time, the House is considering a bill that will weaken the ADA by granting leniency to businesses in violation of the law. These actions are counter to the spirit of democracy, but not at all surprising in the spirit of capitalism.
Conservatives and liberals alike use the concept of meritocracy to explain the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
In order to go on pretending that capitalism is compatible with democracy, we push narratives of self-reliance and overcoming adversity. Our culture expects people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and “rise above their circumstances.” These common expressions justify the denial of resources to people in need. Conservatives and liberals alike use the concept of meritocracy to explain the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
I don’t know about you, but I would rather live in a community than a meritocracy. Communities are collaborative rather than competitive. To achieve community, we have to throw ableist concepts like competition, productivity, and individual market value out the window altogether.
Disability justice is not a minority issue: it benefits us all.
If we want to build a better world — a democratic world — it is high time we start putting disability justice first. People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority at twenty percent of the population. But disability justice is not a minority issue: it benefits us all. Taking steps towards accessibility and inclusiveness is not a charitable gesture, but a basic requirement of a democratic society. Disability justice is not a sidebar issue to pile on top of all the other social justice issues of our day. This list will show you how disability justice is a central and interactive component of every issue facing our democracy.
1. Citizenship and Rights
How we choose to grant citizenship and rights reveals a lot about how we define ourselves as a society. Who belongs? Who deserves access to material resources? Who has power? In a capitalist society that values competition and productivity, a person’s quality is measured in terms of strength, intelligence, and capacity for labor.
Historically in the US, we have denied rights to minority groups by associating them with disability: anti-abolitionists would say African American slaves were less intelligent and more prone to disease than whites; anti-suffragists would say women were less intelligent than men and too weak, nervous, and emotional to be trusted with voting. The same logic applies in the history of immigration policy.
History and the present alike are full of examples of people using ableist arguments to justify sexist and racist viewpoints.
2. Gender Inequality
The now-fired Google engineer who wrote the manifesto against diversity initiatives, James Damore, explained the gender gap in tech by arguing that women are biologically inferior. Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military was based on the idea that their healthcare is a “burden.”
3. Immigration
It sounds like something out of the nineteenth century, but even now, there are groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or “FAIR,” trying to prove that there’s a relationship between race and intelligence. This bigotry is reminiscent of a well-known scene in Django Unchained, in which Leonardo DiCaprio, playing a plantation owner, measures a skull and uses the bogus science of phrenology to prove the inferiority of “the negro.” There are still people in this nation who really want those kinds of arguments to be true, as the persistence of white supremacy in our society shows. FAIR is funded by the Pioneer Fund, which was founded by Nazi sympathizers. It’s classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but that hasn’t stopped its associates from claiming positions of power.
4. Voting Rights
The co-chair of Trump’s voter fraud commission is Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, who was legal counsel for FAIR. As the author of anti-immigrant laws in Arizona that were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Kobach has a history of targeting Latinos, and now he’s been tasked with proving Trump’s claim that millions of non-citizens and dead people voted for Hillary.
The voter ID laws the GOP puts forth to fight this fiction of voter fraud have a far greater impact on the poor, on disabled people, and on communities of color. Even without voter ID laws, the inaccessibility of voting also prevents a lot of disabled people from having a say.
5. Labor
The majority of Americans with disabilities do not have jobs (over 80% according to BLS), and those with jobs experience a variety of challenges getting the accommodations they need. The Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates that employers cannot discriminate on the basis of disability and that they have to provide “reasonable accommodations,” but what is “reasonable” in a capitalist society is often decided by the employer, and the employer usually ends up winning lawsuits. Many people with disabilities choose not to disclose their disabilities because there are social and material consequences for doing so. The silence around disability exacerbates stigma, but people’s reasons for nondisclosure make a lot of sense in this culture.
Alarmingly, certain employers can legally pay disabled workers significantly less than the minimum wage, under section 14c of the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). This injustice is called the “Special Minimum Wage Program.” Across the country, there are still thousands of employers licensed under section 14c paying subminimum wages to workers with disabilities. The majority of these are “sheltered workshops,” which were originally proposed as vocational training facilities — but a report from the General Accounting Office estimates that fewer than 5% of people working in these facilities have left for other jobs.
Rooted in Rights’ original documentary Bottom Dollars explores the Special Minimum Wage Program in depth. As the grassroots momentum behind the Fight for 15 grows, I’m surprised more people aren’t aware of section 14c.
6. Healthcare
The relationship between disability justice and access to healthcare is obvious. The GOP’s recent proposal to make cuts to Medicaid in order to fund an upper-class tax cut is class warfare in the most extreme. This would mean disabled people, both children and adults, would lose access not only to doctors, but also to housing, and to services related to both health and education. Healthcare is a matter of life and death. “Pre-existing conditions” is a category that includes all disabilities as well as many health problems that need not be disabling with proper care. So, this “healthcare” proposal would expand the disabled population and push many people to poverty and death in order to make the rich richer. I see, in this, a “survival of the fittest” ideology that rivals the eugenics laws of a hundred years ago. In essence, these “healthcare” proposals presume to tell us which lives are worth living, and which people are “better off dead.”
The direct actions of activists from ADAPT were a huge part of the reason Trumpcare failed to pass this summer. Clearly, disabled activists know what it takes to get the job done, and there is a lot more that nondisabled organizers can do to be inclusive. For the time being, the GOP has run out of ideas on healthcare. Organizers on the left are taking the opportunity to advocate for Medicare for All. Passing this legislation would be an important first step in radically transforming our cutthroat culture, replacing it with community values.
Although the GOP was unable to repeal Obamacare, the new tax bill eliminates the individual mandate for health insurance, which will likely raise premiums. Despite years of decrying the national deficit, Republicans have just voted to increase it by one and a half trillion to pay for corporate tax cuts, and Paul Ryan just confirmed that they will approach the deficit with so-called “entitlement reform” — in other words, cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
7. Education
Betsy DeVos demonstrated in her confirmation hearings that she doesn’t know what the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is or how it works. The school choice programs she supports have a long history of redirecting public tax dollars to private schools that limit the rights of kids with disabilities.
8. Housing
Accessible, affordable housing in the community is hard to come by. Across the nation there is a growing population of young people with disabilities being housed inappropriately in nursing homes and hospice, sometimes for decades, and poor record-keeping makes it difficult to locate these people and help them transition. The Independent Living movement provides resources and services to empower disabled people to live independently: Centers for Independent Living are “consumer-controlled, community-based, cross-disability, nonresidential private nonprofit agenc[ies] that [are] designed and operated within a local community by individuals with disabilities and provides an array of independent living services.” You can use the Independent Living Research Utilization to locate your nearest Center. In my state of North Carolina, we have only eight Centers of Independent Living, which leaves most counties entirely unserved.
9. Criminal justice
For people with mental illnesses, the biggest healthcare providers are prisons. Americans with disabilities are victims of violent crimes at three times the rate of nondisabled people. In cases of police brutality, between one-third and half of people killed have a disability. The presence of disability often serves to justify the violence after the fact. Eric Garner, Ethan Saylor, Charleena Lyles, LaQuan McDonald, Philip Coleman, Quintonio Legrier, Stephon Watts. How many do I fail to include in this list?
10. Environment and Infrastructure
It’s also important to recognize the ways our industries and infrastructures disable certain populations. When the hog industry in North Carolina needed to find a way to get rid of its waste, it targeted poor communities of color, having a negative impact on their health. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is an example of the state’s cost-saving strategies having an enormous detrimental impact on lifetime health: lead poisoning.
The emergency response to climate disasters like we saw in Houston, South Florida, Northern California, and Puerto Rico highlights the inaccessibility issues in our communities that have always been there. Paul Timmons of Portlight Inclusive Disaster Strategies spoke to the Senate about the need for relief for older and disabled people in emergency situations. If we were to design our infrastructure with disability accessibility in mind, the emergency response to disasters would be better for everyone.
Taking steps towards accessibility and inclusiveness is not a charitable gesture, but a basic requirement of a democratic society.
The fiction that America is a nation of self-starters does little credit to our communities. The late disability studies scholar Tobin Siebers asks, What if we recognized vulnerability as the rule in human communities? If we were to grant people rights and protections on a basis of need rather than ability and strength — if we could disentangle ability from deservingness — the oppressive narratives of the right would have less power. Essentially, we have to redefine our “American values” away from independence, strength, and competition, and toward interdependence, humanity, and care. It might feel like an impossible task to revise core cultural values, but we do have other core American values we can turn to: the pledge of allegiance invokes “liberty and justice for all.” Our deep failure to achieve disability justice shows how capitalism, and its attendant liberal fantasies of a meritocracy, actively precludes the inclusive democracy we pay lip service to.
