ADA @ 30 — Dismantling the Master’s House
As the Americans with Disabilities Act turns 30 this year, this celebration falls in the shadow of the stark reality that Black, Indigenous and other disabled People of Color, and disabled people who live at the intersection of other marginalized identities, are seen as expendable in the eyes of medical professionals and state and federal governments. Enacted in 1990, the Americans with Disablists Act (ADA) set forth a “clear and comprehensive mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities” in all aspects of life.
Despite this promise, the response to the coronavirus pandemic revealed the existing faults in disability rights as a tool to protect, exposing a porousness in access to the promises of the ADA for disabled people who live at the intersection of marginalized identities. As the pandemic endures, little spotlight is given to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on communities at the intersection of disability, race and other intersecting identities. Rather, analysis of the coronavirus pandemic consistently treats disability and race as two distinct identities facing different threats and harms based on a single-issue identification — as being either a person of color or disabled.
Even 30 years after its passage, the ADA could not halt societal and state control over the bodies and personhood of Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) with disabilities during a global crisis. Control occurred through the administration of the experimental treatment of hydroxychloroquine on disabled Black and Brown people as a COVID-19 treatment that medical experts later linked to injuries and deaths; in the inaccessibility of hydroxychloroquine for people with autoimmune diseases such as Lupus — a chronic illness that impacts women of color 2–3 more timesthan white women — following the hoarding of the drug by medical and government institutions as a result of President Donald Trump’s claim that it could treat COVID-19; by the decision of state and medical personnel to withhold medical treatment for COVID-19 to patients based on the belief that their disability has already diminished their quality of life; in the unsanitary and overcrowding of prisons and immigration detention centers as COVID-19 spreads throughout these facilities; and in statistics finding that nearly 40% of deaths are linked to nursing homes — with COVID-19 ravaging nursing homes with largely Black and Latinx residents.
In her essay, “ADA 30: No Justice for Disabled Native People,” Jen Deerinwater discusses what the ADA means to her “as a disabled and chronically ill Indigenous person.” Deerinwater resides in Oklahoma, a state with one of the largest Native populations in the United States. Citing to Oklahoma’s lack of access to affordable housing, medical care and clean water, in addition to the inadequate availability of COVID-19 testing and facilities to process tests, the environmental pollution that overwhelms the state and the failure of Governor Stiff to issue a statewide stay-at-home order despite the pandemic, she concludes, “[h]onestly, [the ADA] means very little to me. I’d rather the ADA exist than not, but as we’re seeing under COVID-19 it means very little for Native lives.”
What does the ADA mean to Black, disabled lives? Disability advocates are challenging the decision of medical professionals after the death of Michael Hickson, a 46-year-old Black father of five with multiple disabilities — quadriplegia, cortical blindness, and a brain injury — who died of complications from COVID-19 after a court-appointed guardian discontinued his medical treatment, including hydration and nutrition for six days, over the objection of his wife of 18 years. In the decision to end treatment, the doctor told Mrs. Hickson that treatment was futile because her husband did not “have much of” a quality of life because of his disabilities.
Deerinwater’s view that Indigenous disabled lives are expendable, even with the advancements of the ADA, and the outrage following the death of Michael Hickson are solidified by the historical underpinnings that are rooted in the disabling effects of racism, poverty, ableism, colonialism, medical racism, environment injustice, chattel slavery, and eugenics. The single-issue focus on either race or disability weakens the unified strength that is required to dismantle systems of state control over the bodies of disabled Black, Indigenous and other People of Color. The pandemic is merely acting as a mirror that reflects the treatment of disabled Black, Indigenous and other People of Color in society and the actions that are often initiated, condoned and executed by medical and governmental decision-makers.
Jay Justice, a queer disabled Black woman, recently summed up this analysis succinctly: “My disability does not add to the challenges created by racial injustice. The institutionalized ableism and state-mandated poverty, that is inexorably linked to disability because of the policies enacted by our government, is what adds to the challenges created by racial injustice.” We can no longer talk about disability without talking about race and its intersections as they are interwoven in the roots of ableism and disability/racial oppression. Disability rights and racial justice must stand together in cross-movement solidarity to dismantle the master’s house.
