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."