Wednesday, October 23, 2013
The "Social Model" In Action
There's something I should have added yesterday when I was talking about how sliding backwards on accessibility in a business can affect both employees and customers.
The "Social Model" of disability says that people who have disabilities are more harmed and hampered by discrimination and physical barriers in the community than by their actual bodily impairments. This is a pretty widely-accepted concept among people with disabilities and others, especially those who are activists or who have studied and thought deeply about disability issues. Although you don't often hear it outright, I suspect that many people who hear about the Social Model of Disability find it hard to swallow. Maybe they look at their own impairments, or those of friends and family, and feel it's just going too far into abstract theory to say that being paralyzed is fine, while the real problem is lack of curb cuts.
Put exactly that way, I agree that this sounds just a bit off.
The thing is that certain situations prove in a very concrete, very non-theoretical way why the Social Model makes sense. A supermarket cashier who uses a wheelchair and has a wheelchair-accessible work area is, in the practical sense, less disabled. She can physically do the job, and she can earn her own living. If her work area is made inaccessible … a counter made too high, a desk made too low, wheelchair maneuvering space narrowed or blocked … then she is, in fact, more disabled than she was before, even though her physical impairments haven't changed.
When a promising young person has a car accident resulting in a permanent disability, it's big news in a community, a story that makes people feel sorry and sympathetic. When a disabled worker is carelessly squeezed out because of poorly planned, entirely preventable physical changes in a workplace, the affects are, in a very real way, the same. Those are the times when the Social Model of Disability is proved correct and most relevant.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Photo Of The Day
"And here we have our Board President, Mark Christiansen, taking a nice nap while his wheelchair is repaired by AD Kim Meichle."
From the Independent and Visible Tumblr blog.
When They Make Things Worse
One of the disability bloggers I follow, "Crazy Crip Girl", has been going through a long, slow-motion disaster at her workplace. The gist of it seems to be that the supermarket where she works did a big remodel, which included making all the checkout counters higher than they used to be. I don't know whether they are still within ADA specs, but they are too high for this wheelchair user to work as a cashier, meaning she's been bounced around from one position to another. At first, management assured her that the renovations wouldn't mess up the accessibility of her work area, and obviously that's exactly what happened. Then they said they'd put in some kind of ramp / platform so she'd be raised up to compensate for higher counters. They said it, but didn't get around if for weeks … for months? Finally, after yet another soul-crushing meeting, they finally had maintenance put in that ramp, which took them just a day to accomplish. Then, she comes back after a weekend to find they've taken the ramp out; they said it was a safety hazard.
This seems like a textbook case of personal advocacy and systems advocacy going together. Raising the height of the checkout counters may have cost a wheelchair user a job. I'm sure it's also caused inconvenience for wheelchair using shoppers, and shoppers who are very short, like me. I wish they'd commit to a proper, individualized "reasonable accommodation" for "Crazy Crip Girl". But it would be even better if they were forced to redo all their recently remodeled counters, to make them lower again.
They can't say nobody warned them.
To get the story from "Crazy Crip Girl" herself,
That should get you caught up on the latest developments, and some of the great comments and ideas others have sent.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Disability News
Mark Sherman, Associated Press - October 21, 2013
Florida uses a strict IQ measurement to determine whether a person is "mentally disabled" for the purposes of prohibiting or allowing the death penalty. The court will look at whether such as simple and definitive cutoff, which doesn't take into account any other factors, is Constitutional.
Kate Brumback, Time Magazine - October 20, 2013
Georgia uses the standard of "beyond reasonable doubt". It sounds like they do consider more than just an IQ score, but that their overall bar for proving "mental disability" is very high. I guess it means that they wouldn't execute someone if a jury said, "He's definitely mentally disabled", but they would if they said, "He's probably mentally disabled."
Death penalty cases involving disabled people are confusing to me. I oppose the death penalty, and I hate to see disabled people punished when they might not really process what it's all about. On the other hand, I worry about messing with or perhaps expanding legal mechanisms for "proving" people are incompetent, in whatever context. Are there any lawyers out there who know whether widening the group considered "mentally disabled" in terms of the death penalty might also expand the group cognitively impaired people people not allowed to make their own life choices? If the Supreme Court decides that while the dividing line is a 70 IQ, 72 is "close enough", will more adults end up under guardianship of their parents or of agencies?
CBS / AP - October 18, 2013
It sounds like the lawsuit may be based a lot on technicalities and specific medical evidence, not so much on the broader issues. That's probably okay. In terms of deterrence, the main thing is that Regal Cinemas and the mall company might re-evaluate their policies on how to handle unruly customers ... including maybe training staff and security on how to recognize and deal with people who have cognitive impairments.
Another way this could go is that movie theater companies might start requiring disabled people to have supervision, or order their staffs to not interact with them at all. If someone with Down Syndrome decides to go to a movie unaccompanied, after this incident and after a winning lawsuit, will managers just say, "Shit, I don't want them in there alone. Who knows what they'll do?!" Never underestimate a municipality or a conglomerate's ability to learn the wrong lessons from a tragedy.
I set my Google News page to find disability-related stories using keywords, "disabled" and "disability", and I pick a few that interest me.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Bummer
Alan Sepinwall, HitFix.com - October 18, 2013
I'll have more to say about this later in the week. Right now I'll just note two things:
I'm disappointed that the new Ironside didn't make it, but also that nobody in the TV critic community seems to care.
I still haven't watched last week's episode of the show, which I suppose means it really wasn't very good.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Air Travel Tips
AmputeeOT's video this week is about traveling by air as an amputee. As usual, she has a very optimistic outlook on things. Travel for people with physical disabilities doesn't always go smoothly, even when you do plan ahead. At the same time, she's pretty realistic, and everything she says makes good sense. And anyway, this blog sometimes gets a bit bleak, so I like to balance it out with some lighter stuff once in awhile.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Quote
Just read this. Had to share it:
"I have heard a thousand times over, 'I’d rather be dead than in a wheelchair.' Oh. OK. Then could I have a taster on hand before I eat dinner at your place?"
A Simple Rule ...
How about this for a "rule" to help people avoid saying things that annoy people with disabilities? …
Whenever you think you've hit on a very clever turn of phrase that you think will make a unique and positive statement about people with disabilities … forget it. Puns, creative spellings and syntax, reversals of meaning … they all sound great and wise and original in our heads, but they usually fall flat when spoken or written, and when the subject is disability-related, they are almost never original. As a person with disabilities, I guarantee you, whatever brilliant bon mot you thing you've come up with about disability, or some "new" way to be politically correct about it, we've heard it before, and we we are underwhelmed.
If you're going to say something about how you think about us or about disabilities, just say it normally. Don't try to be clever or super-insightful.
Thank you.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Followup: From An Old Familiar Place
I thought of a couple of things late last night, after I reblogged and commented on that account of how a young woman with Cerebral Palsy was treated by an ER nurse.
The story made me instantly angry in a way that very few things do. I shared it because of that, and because I think it's important to remember that sometimes, things really are as bad as we say they are … that while being a chronic misanthrope isn't healthy, it isn't always entirely wrong.
What I only thought of later is that this was a somewhat rare case when a person's fundamental ableism was in the raw, explicitly stated. In a way, that's a good thing. Usually, we don't actually hear people say we're not a "real person". Instead it's a tone of voice, a look, a reticence. In medical situations, it often manifests in a subtle disconnect. They ask us questions and we answer, and their responses and followups suggest that our answers were not accepted at face value. From there, it progresses to where every conversation with a doctor or nurse has a subtext … like they think something about us that they're not saying out loud. And of course, we feel paranoid for thinking that. It can be a real mess.
One other thought. What the nurse said seems very extreme, something probably very, very few people believe. It's one thing to be uncomfortable around people with disabilities, or have no patience for our "special needs", but it's quite another to assert that we are not "real" human beings in some fundamental way. But we can't forget that not so very long ago, the idea that people with certain types and degrees of disability didn't deserve the same basic rights as other humans was a mostly accepted and acceptable point of view. And it turned out to be a horribly short walk from abstract philosophical theorizing about genetic "contamination" and "humane" ways of "reliving suffering" to the Nazi T4 program, carried out mainly by medical professionals in what was at the time one of the Western World's most highly educated and "cultured" countries.
It's quite possible that nurse has problems and crises in her life that led to her outburst. But the nature of her outburst was pretty specific, and came from a familiar pool of ideology. The horror isn't that she said those words on a particular day to a particular person, it's that the ideas behind those words still have currency for who knows how many people.
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