My name is Lydia X. Z. Brown,

and I'm an attorney, advocate, 
community organizer, educator, strategist,

and thinker and writer on
disability rights and disability justice.

For over 10 years, my work has focused
on interpersonal and state violence

targeting disabled people
at the margins of the margins,

especially disabled people living
at the intersections of disability, race,

class, gender, sexuality,
language, and nation.

Like all disabled people, it's impossible
to say that there was one instance

in which I suddenly became aware of

inaccessibility or exclusionary practices
in social life,

because my entire life has been shaped
by the forces of ableism.

Like most other autistic people,
I experienced bullying

throughout my childhood and in schools,

and I experienced a disconnect between
the ways that I moved through the world,

and the ways that people around me,

who were largely not autistic,
moved through the world.

But I will say that one of the times
that I became most aware

of grave injustices targeting
other disabled people

were a series of incidents
that were widely publicized

when I was in high school.

And, in all of those instances,
young autistic people were criminalized,

taken out of their schools,
often charged in adult criminal court

for simply existing while autistic.

In many of those cases,
the autistic students in question

had been subjected to prolonged restraint
and seclusion, sometimes for hours,

before they were the ones who were charged

with assaulting the teachers
in the schools in the first place.

Some of those students were white.

Others were Black, brown,
or other people of color.

And, in all of those cases,
the sentiment that came most strongly

and clearly through public reporting
on the incidents,

was that these were kids
who had to be managed or controlled,

instead of, here are kids who have 
been targeted on the basis

of disability discrimination.

That, to me, was a very clear indicator
of just the beginning

of how pervasive and how awful
violence against disabled people is,

especially those who are
multiply marginalized.

In the cases of many of the white 
students, if they were unlucky,

they might have been forced
out of their school.

But in the cases of the Black and brown
disabled students,

some of them were sentenced
to prison terms of years.

Others were killed outright.

Although the ADA was passed
and signed into law three decades ago,

government agencies, individual
organizations, and even and especially

disability advocacy organizations,
flagrantly and violate-

flagrantly and blatantly violate
the ADA's most basic provisions.

Government agencies that are required
to support disabled people

and provide and enable access
for disabled people

routinely disregard those obligations.

Private corporations and nonprofit
organizations do much the same.

Colleges and universities do not
respect their disabled students.

Corporations do not respect
their disabled employees.

Writ large, in society,
although the law has changed,

the values that we hold
and the beliefs that we have

as an entire society
have not changed at all,

because you can't legislate morality.

You could pass the best laws on the books,

and even if you somehow monitor
and enforce them,

it doesn't mean that you've actually
changed the ways that people think

and talk about and understand 
and react toward and act

about disabled people
and disability in society.

So, when I think about ways
that the ADA has fallen short,

it's not necessarily just
what is the language of the ADA,

but it is how individual advocates,
it is how courts,

and it is how those with positions
of power and access to privilege

and resources choose to act
or not act upon the ADA.

And you see that everywhere.

The disability organizations
that have the most access

to power, privilege, and resources

generally advocate only for the interests
and the issues that affect those

who already hold the most privilege
in disabled communities.

That is, they care deeply about issues
that primarily, or only,

affect disabled people who are white,
who are monied, who are degreed,

who are otherwise considered palatable.
But for disabled people who are

at the margins of the margins,
for disabled people of color,

for disabled people that are
generationally low income,

for disabled people who are undocumented

or have other immigration status
other than citizenship,

for disabled people who belong 
to minority religions,

for disabled people who are 
queer or trans,

for disabled people who cannot work

in the ways that are
expected under capitalism,

those issue areas of inclusion
in the corporate workplace

or the ability to access 
swimming pools in a hotel

or the ability to bring
your service animal on a plane

can be important,
but are often not affecting our lives

in the same daily ways as they do
those who have infinitely more privilege.

And so, where I see the gaps are
where are the folks

who have power, privilege, and resources
in talking about the right

to Black and brown
disabled students to AAC?

Where are those folks in thinking about
the horrific violence inflicted

on largely Black and Native disabled
people in carceral systems?

Where are those same people
in looking at the ways in which police

destroy the lives of sex workers and
people who are using criminalized drugs

who are not white, who do not come
from upper middle class

or upper class families and neighborhoods
and communities?

Where are those folks when thinking about
the ways in which universities

not only prevent disabled students
in general from accessing supports

and accommodations,
but put the brunt of that violence

most predominantly on queer and trans
disabled people of color and even

force disabled students, especially
those that are multiply marginalized,

out of the university altogether,

or prevent them from ever getting to ask
the university in the first place?

Where are those same advocates
when thinking about not just,

how are disabled people in the U.S.
represented or not represented in media

or in electoral politics,
but what about the ways in which

the United States inflicts
and causes disability globally

through our wars, through our imperialism,
through our colonization?

We need to be pushing as hard
as we possibly can for money to go

directly back into the hands
of directly impacted community members

and out of harmful systems
like the foster system, police, prisons,

coercive mental health care.

We need to be demanding
a return of resources

and a return of power,
and that is a ceding of power

by nondisabled people, by white people,
by those who have hoarded and controlled

the most amount of power
and privilege and resources,

and done so at the direct expense
of disabled people

at the margins of the margins,

and that has to start
within our own organizations.

Disability nonprofits are notorious
for being so often white-led

or predominantly white-led,
and sometimes only white-led,

for being male-led,
for being led by people who are either

not disabled at all or have what
are considered palatable disabilities,

and that needs to change.

And the only way that will change
is if those people

who occupy those positions of power
agree to give up that power.

Not to be told, "You don't have a voice,"
to be very clear.

To be told, "Your voice doesn't have to
be the one that's in charge

and holds all the power."