Category: “Disability” News

The ADA @ 30: “Pollux and Castor”

I want you to help me. I don’t want your help. The push-pull of disability, the Pollux and Castor, a civic constellation. “Help me,” doesn’t mean we need you able bodied citizens to become Boy Scouts who escort us across streets; doesn’t mean “pity us” or by turns imagining we’re somehow inspiring. Thirty years after the ADA “help me” means picturing new ways of doing things. It also means accommodations for the disabled are reasonable so let’s stop pretending otherwise. 

“Who pretends otherwise?” Why would anyone be opposed to providing the disabled with reasonable accommodations? What is a reasonable accommodation? Let’s look:

Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (the “ADA”)(1) requires an employer(2) to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities who are employees or applicants for employment, unless to do so would cause undue hardship. “In general, an accommodation is any change in the work environment or in the way things are customarily done that enables an individual with a disability to enjoy equal employment opportunities.”(3)

See: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-reasonable-accommodation-and-undue-hardship-under-ada#intro

Perhaps no bigger transformation in the lives of the disabled has ever happened. The very idea that it’s reasonable to modify basic workaday structures and appurtenances was radical and remains so. Few people understand that disability is a product of the industrial revolution with its vast reorganization of labor. The advent of dark Satanic mills lead to the valuation of labor ready bodies. The factories of the 19th century redefined the value of bodies just as they exacted standards of physicality. What’s the Castor to the factory’s Pollux? The asylum. The disabled were stripped of civic and economic value in the early 19th century. Rather than modifying the work environment why not warehouse those with physical or neurological differences? 

We shouldn’t forget what a radical concept “reasonable accommodation” truly is. It is reasonable to provide the blind with Braille signage or technical adaptations. It’s reasonable to provide a bank clerk with lupus a tall stool to sit on and modified work breaks. Reasonable to provide deaf employees with supportive technology. The provision of these things does not induce undue hardship. They’re not expensive. As a blind employee I can’t demand my own jacuzzi on the roof. I can ask for a talking computer. 

I say that reasonable accommodations are revolutionary and they’re the antidote to pity. 

This begs the question “why would any employer fight reasonable accommodations?”

Consider most recently the story of Dominos Pizza which cried foul when a blind customer demanded that their website and phone app be usable by those with vision impairments. I want to streamline this: the blind use screen reading software to access digital sites. In turn websites need to be written with the proper coding to allow the computer or phone to talk. This is really simple. I kid you not. Making an app or website accessible to the blind costs next to nothing. 

Dominos took their umbrage and hostility all the way to the US Supreme Court. They lost. Turns out even the pro-business Supremes saw through the ruse: Dominos website is in fact a public space and most therefore be accessible. Moreover, Domino’s spent more money fighting the blind than they’d ever have spent making their website and app friendly for the blind, Reasonable means reasonable. 

When a business fights the ADA its resistance generally speaks to why the law had to be adopted in the first place. In shorthand: it’s easy to include the disabled in the workplace. It’s inconvenient for some to have to think about it. Reasonable accommodations are not inconvenient, They do require imagination. I know of an agricultural studies  student who used a wheelchair. Her university easily modified a tractor so she could ride it. With imagination and a can do spirit you can do almost anything where disability is concerned. And yes,  the tractor modification was cheap. 

Another way to put this is I don’t need help crossing the street. I do need help using your bank machine if it’s  not blind friendly. Only unimaginative built environments trigger my need for assistance. I don’t want your help. I want to use the damn device. 

Dominos argued that the blind could call up their stores and have staff read them the menu options. Imagine that. Why does the app exist? So you can do it yourself. I’ll just say that if you call a Domino’s, tell then you’re blind, and ask them to read their entire menu and the prices they’ll hang up on you.  

The ADA @ 30: “The Happenstance Blues”

So forgive me for starting with a grayness but as I recently joked with a paralyzed friend, “I feel like a battered old fish with many dents in his flesh”—the context—that it’s not probable I’ll see the advances I’d hoped for when the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted over a quarter century ago. I’m old enough to be feeling what academics call accidie, a weariness, and if I’m not defeated I’m suspicious. 

Shorthand: we haven’t gotten far enough, and daily the news is incontestable. The “fish conceit” is what can happen to believers and how not to become the fish is the story (mine and yours) since disability bias surrounds us. (Bias is a story with many chapters like Bocaccio and knowing it never renders comfort, though if you’re a bigot you may enjoy schadenfreude. I once had an “iffy” friend who practiced “vengeance fantasy”—as he said, seeing his enemies staked out in the Colosseum with lions chewing at their entrails, etc. He’d rub his hands and imitate Charles Laughton: “how do you like your God now, Christian?”)

Bias is a variorum edition. My spotty pal really meant what he said—if he’d had his way he’d have fried you in oil. Everyone has his own grayness. Discrimination, personified, wants us to join the Centurions, at least inside, and its first sign is indifference. In my experience street theater is one way to resist it. 

Thirty years ago when I was a Fulbright Scholar in Helsinki, Finland I went one night to a gritty, working class bar where I was accosted by a wildly drunken laborer. Everyone was painfully drunk–that manly near death atavistic Viking berserk hallucination of everything, and I thought: “all these years, so many wounds, so few praises.” That was when a man I did not know turned to me and said: “You are a Jew!” “You’re right,” I said, since I was young and in love with poetry, “I am a Jew!” It was the first time I’d ever felt the pins of anti-Semitism, I, a Lutheran with a long beard. He reached for me then but missed and grabbed another man. “You are a Jew!” he shouted. “No, it is I,” I said, “I am the Jew!” But it was too late. They were on the floor and cursing, two men who had forgotten the oldest notion of them all: in Jewish history there are no coincidences.

Kurt Vonnegut would say, “bias is a clunker” and though it must be taken seriously, if you’re one of its chapter headings having a shield of irony becomes essential. You’re a cripple. You don’t belong in here. Don’t belong on this website, on this campus, don’t belong in a customary place of business. For years I used to carry custom made stickers depicting the universal disability access symbol inside a red circle with a line through it. I’d paste them on the doors of inaccessible restaurants and academic buildings and the like. I really need to get more of them but I can’t remember where I they came from, and as I say, I’m in danger of weariness. Dear young Cripples, I’ve been fighting a long time. Thank God for ADAPT. And don’t stop fighting. But don’t stop laughing either. As the great disability writer and activist Neil Marcus says: “Disability is not a ‘brave struggle’ or ‘courage in the face of adversity’…Disability is an art. it’s an ingenious way to live.”

Once while I was teaching at The Ohio State University I was invited to a meeting with a dozen faculty and former astronaut and Senator John Glenn. We discussed the future of digital teaching. Afterwards I boarded a Columbus City bus only to face a woman who loudly asked if she “could pray for me”. She assumed blindness was a sad matter—or worse—a sign I needed spiritual rescue. My guide dog shook his collar. Suddenly I felt wickedly improvisational. I stood up, grabbed the overhead pedestrian bar, and announced loudly so every passenger could hear: “Certainly Madame you may pray for me, but only if I can pray for you, and in turn pray for all the sad souls on this bus—souls buttressed on all sides by tragedies and losses, by DNA and misadventures in capitalism, for we’re all sorrowing Madame, we’re all chaff blown by the cruel winds of post-modernism. Let us pray, now, together; let’s all hold hands!” She fled the bus at the next stop. Strangers applauded. 

Improvisation allows us to force the speed of associational changes, transforming the customs of disability life. Disability Studies scholar Petra Kuppers writes: If the relations between embodiment and meaning become unstable, the unknown can emerge not as site of negativity but as the launch pad for new explorations. By exciting curiosities, by destabilizing the visual as conventionalized primary access to knowledge, and by creating desires for new constellations of body practice, these disability performances can attempt to move beyond the known into the realm of bodies as generators of positive difference. 

The polarizations, magnetic fields of crippledness are generators. It is not true that rebellion simply makes us old. We’re old when we give up.

And yet…the fights before us are promising to be both rewarding and very hard.

I have the happenstance blues. They’re both accidental (aleatoric) and whatever is the opposite of accident, which, depending on your point of view might have something to do with the means of production, racial determinism from same, or all the other annotated bigotries of the culture club.  As a disabled writer I know a good deal about the culture club. 

Now back to my happenstance blues…

I’m right here. I’m terribly inconvenient. Blind man at conference. Blind man in the lingerie shop. All built environments are structured and designed strategically to keep my kind out. My kind includes those people who direct their wheelchairs with breathing tubes, amble with crutches, speak with signs, type to speak, roll oxygen tanks, ask for large print menus or descriptive assistance. I’m here standing against the built geographical concentrations of capital development. I’m here. I’m the penny no one wants anymore. My placement is insufficiently circulatory in the public spaces of capital. Which came first, the blues or the architectural determinism that keeps me always an inconvenience?

Capital creates landscapes and determines how the gates will function. Of course there was a time before capital accumulation. It’s no coincidence the disabled were useful before capitalism. The blind were vessels of memory. The blind recited books. Disability is a strategic decision. Every disabled person either knows this or comes a cropper against the gates when they least expect it.

What interests me is how my happenstance-disability-blues are exacerbated by neoliberal capital accumulation. For accumulation one must thing of withholding money from the public good or dispossession, which is of course how neoliberal capital works.  

Here is geographer David Harvey in an interview, talking about just this:

Accumulation by dispossession is about dispossessing somebody of their assets or their rights. Traditionally there have been rights which have common property, and one of the ways in which you take these away is by privatizing them. We’ve seen moves in recent years to privatize water. Traditionally, everybody had had access to water, and [when] it gets privatized, you have to pay for it. We’ve seen the privatization of a lot of education by the defunding of the public sector, and so more and more people have to turn to the private sector. We’ve seen the same thing in health care.What we’re talking about here is the taking away of universal rights, and the privatization of them, so it [becomes] your particular responsibility, rather than the responsibility of the state. One of the proposals which we now have is the privatization of Social Security. Social Security may not be that generous, but it’s universal and everybody has part of it. What we are now saying is, “That shouldn’t be; it should be privatized,” which, of course, means that people will then have to invest in their own pension funds, which means more money goes to Wall Street. So this is what I call privatization by dispossession in our particular circumstance.

At the neoliberal university and all its concomitant conferences, workshops, and “terms abroad” (just to name some features of higher ed where my own disability has been problematized) the provision of what we call “reasonable accommodations” under the Americans with Disabilities Act is often considered to be in opposition to accumulation. For instance: I was asked to teach a term abroad in Istanbul. When I pointed out that Istanbul isn’t a guide dog friendly city and that I’d have trouble with the traffic and requested a sighted guide accompany me there, I was told this was too expensive. Think about it! One additional human being to keep me from getting run over was too expensive! The “term abroad” was actually designed to accumulate capital, right down to the lint in each student’s and instructor’s pockets. I decided to avoid getting run over and didn’t go.

Privatized culture means everything, including your safety is your own responsibility. I’m in mind of this. I’m not fooled.

When Trayvon Martin was murdered I wrote about gated communities and the intersection between a black teen’s death and disability exclusion. I opened my piece this way:

I know something about being “marked” as disability is always a performance. I am on the street in a conditional way: allowed or not allowed, accepted or not accepted according to the prejudices and educational attainments of others. And because I’ve been disabled since childhood I’ve lived with this dance of provisional life ever since I was small. In effect, if you have a disability, every neighborhood is a gated community.  

I also wrote:

…as a person who travels everywhere accompanied by a guide dog I know something about the architectures and the cultural languages of “the gate” –doormen, security officers, functionaries of all kinds have sized me up in the new “quasi public” spaces that constitute our contemporary town square. I too have been observed, followed, pointed at, and ultimately told I don’t belong by people who are ill informed and marginally empowered. Like Trayvon I am seldom in the right place. Where precisely would that place be? Would it be back in the institution for the blind, circa 1900? Would it be staying at home always?

I concluded:

There’s a war against black men and boys in this country. There’s also a backlash against women and people with disabilities and the elderly. The forces in all these outrages are the same. The aim is to make all of the United States into a gated community. On the one side are the prisons and warehousing institutions; on the other side, the sanitized neighborhood resorts. I hear the voice: “Sorry, Sir, you can’t come in here.” In my case it’s always a security guard who doesn’t know a guide dog from an elephant. In Trayvon’s case it was a souped up self important member of a neighborhood watch who had no idea what a neighborhood really means. I think all people with disabilites know a great deal about this. I grieve for Trayvon’s family. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him and will never forget.

I have the happenstance blues and they’re a function of design. Differences, and the welcoming of differences require architectures and expenditures of inclusion. It costs money to include the outsiders. You might have to train security guards, authentic ones to protect Trayvon and Stephen. Imagine if they were able to live in peace, share their stories, and spend their money in your neighborhood. (One can’t forget Trayvon was found dead with skittles and a can of soda, the smallest reckonings of teenage happiness…)

Just as accumulation by dispossession involves the creation of labor-free territories, local dispossession requires the devaluation of the individual.

If nothing else, the ADA @ 30 says the cripples have value. 

The ADA @ 30: “Beauty and the Built Environment”

When thinking about the Americans with Disabilities Act we talk about the built environment. The term indicates the where, what, when of humanly constructed public spaces. Where do you need to go? Can you get there? When will you get there? 

What does access mean? If you’re a wheelchair user in New York City these questions are steepened by the most commonplace things—for instance the subway system is not accessible by elevators in most locations. Moreover the few elevators which do exist are usually out of order. 

This is the ADA @ 30: still largely ignored in our nation’s largest cities although the disabled are promised a better future. Plans released a year ago by the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority propose creating forty new accessible subway stations. That’s ten percent of the total number of stations but it would represent an increase over the measly 25 per cent currently available. But seasoned disability rights activists know how this goes: the funding disappears before the ink is dry; delays force trade offs. Meantime no one fixes the existing broken elevators. 

The built environment needs creative thinking now more than ever. By making public spaces user friendly for all we create more than good train stations or schools—we challenge ourselves to embrace broad functionality and dare I say it—beauty. In a recent essay noted disability activist Steve Wright says: 

“There are some great designers who serve wheelchair users and other people with disabilities, but it is amazing how many plans I’ve reviewed — even for complete streets aimed to calm traffic and serve all — that have needlessly introduced multiple barriers to people with disabilities.

That is why I am calling on all professional organizations that impact the built environment to celebrate the ADA. Millions of their members can be inspired to build beautiful, graceful, human-scaled design that will make life more equitable for people who have mobility, sight, hearing and intellectual disabilities.”

As a poet who has a disability and who’s taught creative writing for years, I recognize Steve Wright’s brand of cheerleading. How many times have I extolled the joys and satisfactions of imagination? Think of the movie “Dead Poets Society” where John Keating, played by Robin Williams, practically turns himself inside out to inspire his downcast prep school students. I too have climbed on my desk, made the sleeves of my sweater into moose antlers, declaimed poetry with munificence as if I was a prince in a land of fairy tales. So I know hope when I see it. Be inspired to build beautiful, graceful, human-scaled designs. Try writing a little poetry. These things won’t hurt you. 

The ADA offers an opportunity, especially as we consider rebelling the infrastructure of the United States, to create inviting spaces. Not spaces where the disabled have to fight to get in. Not grudging accommodations. Not the threadworm second rate “improvements” that forget wheelchair access in the very auditorium which now has a ramp but no place for a real wheelchair—not the unpainted wheelchair lift in a thousand campus buildings across the US—those wheelchair lifts they were “forced” to put in, hence resented. Let’s end public spaces clouded by resentments. 

Steve Wright, again:

“We are living in the most partisan, divisive and frightened time in our nearly 250 years as a nation. Everyone has his or her idea of how we can begin to unify, heal, come together. Mine is to celebrate the ADA in the spirit of equity for all.”

The ADA @ 30: Thinking of Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau had a dog named Sultan who accompanied him to England when his life was threatened in France. Poor broken Rousseau with his malformed urinary tract, cloying hypochondria and hot paranoia–also poor in cash, resolutely poor in friendships. Sometimes we think we understand him–we, the descendant cripples–those who spent fortnights alone in childhood and more than once. We who occupied our attentions with flowers and seeds. Rousseau had the triple whammy: his mother died when he was very young, then his father ran away. He was forced to learn the baleful adolescent art of beseeching strangers for protection and love. He was easily tricked into churches and bedrooms. And he was easily discarded. The cripples understand this.

No wonder he discarded neo-classicism for what others would call the romantic. No wonder Shelley and Byron adored him–passions of betrayal and resolution always feel the most authentic. Rousseau’s enemies substituted “savage” for “authentic” and prided themselves for calling him “uppity” which is of course what is generally done to passionate cripples. Small wonder Rousseau took up the matter of social consent among the governed.

Sultan lead him into the English countryside where he seldom encountered another soul. I love knowing this. A dog can stir and extend solitary human concentration which is the reward of stigma, but you must understand it in a canine manner–pay attention to what’s here and here; not yesterday; never tomorrow; and yes, a dog looks the other way when you take from your pocket a handful of French seeds and push them into British soil.

What does Rousseau’s depression and malformed urinary tract have to do with the Americans with Disabilities Act? We’re in a mood of celebration! We can do both. Consider the opening to Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker which is in fact one of the first disability memoirs: 

“So here I am, all alone on this earth, with no brother, neighbour, or friend, and no company but my own. The most sociable and loving of human beings has by common consent been banished by the rest of society. In the refinement of their hatred they have continued to seek out the cruellest forms of torture for my sensitive soul, and they have brutally severed all the ties which bound me to them. ”

He was in fact disabled by malformations of his nether parts and he had profound depression. Being a liminal figure owing to these conditions he was caste out by the congealing engines of 18th century normalcies. On this the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie could agree—the salon, the atelier, the coffee houses were not places to be troubled by the inconveniences of broken embodiments. Having a troubled body meant staying away—meant the asylums and hospitals. It meant living in  the poor houses.  Good bodies meant public bodies. Rousseau’s solitary journeying on foot is disability journeying. He was Basho, a travel weary skeleton. 

Poor Roussea! He had inherited disorders, porphyria which lead to abdominal pain and vomiting; acute neuropathy, muscle weakness and seizures; hallucinations, anxiety, paranoia—and as if these weren’t enough he had cardiac arrhythmias.  He was by turns aggressive, provocative, contrarian, and yes, he was always ill. 

Today in the disability arts community we talk of disablement as epistemology. We know that altered physicality and neurodiversity offer unique and valued ways of thinking. What’s different now from Rousseau’s time is that “with” the ADA the disabled are not as easily caste aside, and though this can be done (one thinks of all the micro aggressions the disabled invariably experience even now, arguing for accessibility, making their point for inclusion and respect against structural ableism) it’s no longer possible to lock the gates of Geneva on that annoying cripple. 

On the subject of micro aggressions much of the Reveries of a Solitary Walker tells of the slights and the disdain Rousseau absorbed and encountered. He was in fact an unpleasant man. I too some days am an unpleasant man. Human rights and their advocacy demand it. Seldom does progress develop for polite societies. But I’ll add also that in Rousseau’s time there was no language for depression—the term itself comes from an age when treatment and acceptance are commonly understood. Instead it was called “melancholia” and it was considered a form of madness. You don’t have to read Foucault to know what happened to the mad though why shouldn’t one recommend it? In any event Rousseau lived in an age when mental illness was believed to be a moral failing. This sub-Cartesian idea has never gone away. 

So as we celebrate the ADA @ 30 let’s remember how it protects and defends our outlier minds and bodies. Let’s not depreciate how crucial this is. Our solitary walks or “rolls” in our chairs are a matter more of recreation than enforcement, at least where the law is practiced. And may the global adoption of disability rights make this so around the world. 

I’ll let Rousseau have the last word:

“Always affected too much by things I see, and particularly by signs of pleasure or suffering, affection or dislike, I let myself be carried away by these external impressions without ever being able to avoid them other than by fleeing. A sign, a gesture or a glance from a stranger is enough to disturb my peace or calm my suffering: I am only my own master when I am alone; at all other times I am the plaything of all those around me.”

One might say, post-ADA, we’re playthings no more. 

The ADA@30: The River

They go down to the rivers, the myth makers and killers. So what’s your approach to the stream? Thinking broadly can the law be the Danube or Mississippi? The essential question: was it written with hope or enmity? I say the ADA was written in hope. I say there’s some enmity “in there” oil slicks on the water, like the proviso that America’s churches don’t have to be accessible; the word “reasonable” as it pertains to accommodations—as if any request for accessibility assistance is inherently suspect. Accommodations are just what they sound like, the Archimedean thing, simple levers. 

I say the ADA is a river. I say we should sing Pete Seeger’s Clearwater song. I say the ADA is all of us—even you who don’t think disability applies at all to your life. The life you now inhabit takes twists and turns. And so your life is also like a river, one with vows bubbling just under the surface. I say the ADA is a river. I say you should look under the surface of your own life. 

I like these lines by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz: 

Leaning on a cane at sunset

I may resemble a gardener 

Who has planted and reared a tall tree.

I say don’t think exclusively of the ADA as a set of regulations. Think of it as the river of new beginnings. 

Yes we need to care for our river. There are those who would pollute its waters—have done so, continue to think of ways to foul it. 

But hear the counsels of the inner eye and see the river. 

The ADA @30: “Blindness is Easy”

Blindness is easy, just ask the advocacy organizations—it’s only impediments are the public’s old fashioned attitudes. I agree. Oh but the public! How it clings to its graffiti! Here are synonyms for blindness from the good old thesaurus: “irrational”; “unperceiving”; “unperceptive”—there are many more pejoratives. 

Being blind means always living the life of an ambassador for consciousness and intelligence in an unfavorable nation. The locals in that nation think deficiencies of the eyes are omens or auguries, as if blindness is the torn entrails of birds in the time of Caesar. Even the well dressed and cheerful Human Resources ladies and gents hear echoes of superstitions as they discuss “accommodations” with a blind job applicant. Inside the HR rep is a tiny voice, like wind whistling through a broken window, it says, “make her go away, please, this person is too much for me, for us…” (Too much, by the way, is the core syntax of all bigotries.) 

Even within awakened disability advocacy circles, the sighted imagine blindness is separate. Closed captioning is often available when videos are shown at universities but never audio description for the blind. If you raise your hand and ask for it, there’s a moue of impatience, even from the faculty who teach disability related topics. “Too much.” Or: “your time hasn’t yet come.”

Blindness is easy once you get the hang of it. You learn about talking computers and Braille displays, learn how to safely navigate the public square, take the bus, (if you’re lucky enough to live where buses run) have an iPhone with an app that reads signs and the labels on jars. 

Easy isn’t quite the right word, let’s say it’s “do-able” but add the caveat that being ambassadors in the unfavorable land, the blind must make it all look easy, must insist that it’s so. 

I’ve been lucky to have a job in higher education for thirty years. I’m even tenured which is statistically unlikely. But here I am at 65 still arguing for basic accommodations not just for myself but for all blind staff and students who choose higher education as a path. I’m the haruspicator—the Roman who spreads the bird entrails on hot stones and reads the future according to the spatter. The future will only be as good as the public finally entertaining that the blind belong. Not as ambassadors or outliers. Not as people who have to keep insisting on access to everything from web sites to libraries, but as fully included human beings. 

We’re not unperceiving unless of course you show films without audio descriptions. My university has no plans to solve this. I get invitations to their annual “disability rights film series” and every year it’s not accessible for people like me. So I don’t go. Later I hear three wheelchair using students exulting about a flick they saw. I get to be the unperceptive one. 

Talking back is nested within ambassadorial protocols. You can’t say you’re fed up. (Which I have.) Can’t say “why do the blind get no respect?” (The Dangerfield gambit?) because if you do, then you’ve violated the prime directive that it’s supposed to be easy—the blindness balm of Gilead for the sighted…

You can’t say “when is our time coming?” Because then you’re a behavioral problem. 

Can’t say “here comes the man or woman with the dark glasses and the cymbals….” A nice pun. But you’re not supposed to be loud. 

The blind in higher education largely have a rotten time. 

I suspect at any moment the doorbell will ring and the central scrutinizer of advocacy ambassadors will take away my diplomatic instruments.    

Meanwhile other synonyms of blindness are “dim”; “obtuse”; “dull”; “witless”—all of which mean you don’t have to listen to me, even if I am a full professor. 

The ADA@30 “Campus Cocktails”

I’ve met hundreds upon hundreds of college faculty throughout my life. I grew up on campuses. My father was a professor, then a Dean, and eventually a college president. My childhood was filled with cocktail parties and chatter. Over the course of my own career I’ve taught at four well known academic institutions and have served in various administrative roles. What I’ve come to understand is that higher education still functions like those cocktail parties of yore and I can attest as a blind man that it’s a party that doesn’t love the disabled. 

My wife worries when I write so candidly about academic ableism. She fears it will brand me, that a prospective future employer will be troubled by my candor. I worry about this also. Yet I can’t shake off what I know. The party is chummy and its held in houses without ramps, where the host doesn’t want your guide dog, where you’ll not be able to use the rest room. And when the clubby faculty actually see you they’ll quickly look past you to see if there’s someone better to talk with. 

Cocktail parties are engines. Their fuel isn’t the vodka, it’s self-contempt disguised as jocularity. As a boy I heard the terrible laughter of the professors—a horse laugh; the basso profundo guffaw; various squeals. They were “me me me” chortles. They scared me. Hawks, wolves, rapacious fish. 

The contempt of faculty for other faculty is an old story. I’ve seen feminist scholars who don’t like other women and who’d do anything to undermine their women colleagues. I’ve seen faculty hiring committees sneer at a job candidate who hailed from a working class background; seen faculty of color dismissed in coded lingo only the chummy would use—his work needs more grounding; further evidence from the published record, etc. 

Ableism in the academy is rampant and college faculty pass it around without scrutiny because it’s the last easy bastion of smug satire—contempt disguised as jocularity—chuckle, if you need an accommodation sonny you’re not a real student. You certainly shouldn’t be on the faculty. 

The professor who advertises that he studies “micro-aggressions” is an ableist. He’ll be the first to tell you if you were a nicer person you’d get the accommodations you need and really it isn’t structural ableism that prevents you from having what you require to work in dignity, it’s your pesky attitude.  Be nicer little fella. By the way while you’re up, can you get me another drink?

The controlling metaphor of higher ed is the boozy get together. Once you’re in, even if you hail from a historically marginalized background yourself, you’ll want to do some sneering about the aspirants who want educations in the land of exceptionalism. The super ego of the academy reflects the ethos of the private club. 

If the boy I was, the one in the attic, who feared the monstrous laughter of the professors had chosen the career outlined for a blind citizen of that era I’d have learned how to cane chairs or sell magazines. Higher ed was my route and yet the road was and is unfriendly just as it is for Black students and all others who are claiming their citizenship and rights from outlier positions. 

But still I expected more from the professors. I expected that by this time in our nation’s history they’d have put down their drinks. 

Some years ago I wrote a little send up “poem” for the professoriate: 

The Professors

Triflers beware! The professors are here:

Punctilious, mindful, on the move,

They’ll flush you out, invest your reveries,

Or close your brown studies. It’s you they’ve watched

Woolgathering, or nonchalant, improvident- tant pis!

Micawbers, slackers, skimmers, here’s your match,

The professors have arrived: the robed Savonarolas!

Leap in the dark, grope or guess, send up a trial balloon,

Rummage, ransack, winnow or appraise–

Inquisitors will grill you: mooncalf, booby, lout, buffoon.

It’s time for gumption, prudence, brains and mother wit:

A bluestocking’s wrangle, a sine qua non;

Alas, poor duffers, bookless, smattering, you invent

A limerick, an Irish muddle, clearly heretic.

O the professors are here: praise Mentor!

They swoop through the long schoolroom,

Vertiginous, oracular, confirmatory, O rodomontade!

Yes you can argue the professors don’t like anybody. But notice the poem reveals how the uneducated serve as metaphors for dumpling students or colleagues they so ardently despise. 

Am I being unfair? The question is absurd. American higher education is the last bastion of nearly undivided disability discrimination. Just visit this website: 

https://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/atteam/lawsuits.html

The ADA @ 30: Essay 11, “Rope-a-Dope”

Dear ADA @ 30:

You have made it possible for people with intellectual disabilities (that hoary and inelegant phrase) to live in the community. You’ve made it possible for wounded veterans returning from combat to stay in the military; made it possible for disabled students to get mainstream educations; there are so many triumphs in your corner. You’ve educated millions around the globe. Not bad my friend. And perhaps the best thing of all: you’ve withstood your enemies, done the Muhammad Ali Rope-a-Dope. Conservative courts and business interests have tried to defeat you but they failed to understand you are the American spirit. 

Dear ADA: I’m a poet. I don’t know much about the law save that I read broadly in many disciplines. Poetry is a guarantee against specialization but not an obstacle to focused curiosity. I love knowing that they composed music for surgical procedures before the age of anesthetics. While they sawed off your leg you could hear a nice quartet. I love knowing that double hydrogen bonds make DNA possible. O how sublime is the very electrolysis of life! And in terms of “the law” I like the axiom that normal people teach the rules but outliers teach the laws. You’re the Queen of the Outliers and you continue to “punch up’ as they say nowadays.

The poet in me likes it that you’ve changed the way disability is used as a matter of law. I’m thinking in this instance of Romer v. Evans, in which the US Supreme Court nullified an amendment to Colorado’s state constitution which made it legal to discriminate against homosexuals, lesbians and bi-sexual citizens in matters of employment, the receipt of social services, and the right even to claim discrimination. The Supreme Court wrote that the Colorado amendment imposed a “broad and undifferentiated disability on a single named group” and added that the impulse for the law was “inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.”

OK. I’m just a poet but this is the first instance so far as I know of the Supreme Court using disability as a juridical metaphor in the service of human freedom. I may be wrong about this but I suspect I’m right. And I suspect the court’s understanding that physical embodiment can be degraded merely owing to bio political considerations was informed by the shift in consciousness brought about by you, Dear ADA. 

Oh how I love you. Let me count the ways. 

The ADA @30: Essay Ten “Dear Friend”

Dear ADA@30:

There are so many things I wish you could hear but you’re made of wood. No wait that’s not quite right. A man can talk to trees. Hell, a man can even talk to a cheese. How do you talk to a law? 

We can only talk back to laws. Even while framing a law our speech sinks into the past. The illusion is that we’re going forward.

Dear ADA: you are a zen koan. We head to the future armed only with the past. Dear ADA we may have ideals but they’re nebulous and misty as when, answering a child’s question “what do you want for Christmas” you reply “oh, just give me universal peace.” 

ADA, now that you’re thirty, our wishes are still “claggy” as the British would say. The disabled are still in the fog. 

Some say it’s your fault but I’m not one of them. It’s not your shortcoming that some say you’re an “unfunded mandate” (a phrase so omnipresent it’s like spearmint chewing gum) and which means “we’re being forced to put in a disability accessible bathroom because we’re remodeling our local MacDonald’s franchise and there are no zero interest dollars by way of  loans, no help for us from “corporate” etc. 

It’s not your fault that those who call you “Old Unfunded” are the same people who oppose  federal and state social programs of any kind. 

It’s certainly not your fault that those you’re designed to protect are deemed burdensome and inconvenient by the Chamber of Commerce. 

If you’re judged by your enemies you’re doing good work my friend.

How do you talk to a law? 

The problem is that you’re latitudinarian rather than sectarian,  you’re Jeffersonian not Hamiltonian. You come from the liberal traditions of humanism. Perhaps you’re the last gasp of the enlightenment. For all I know better times are coming but in the rowboat I can’t see what’s ahead. We keep rowing. 

Dear ADA: the disabled and their allies are rowing just as you asked us to.

Yes, your foes still think you’re a newfangled guild of St. George, some utopian trick designed to ruin our nation’s currency by putting Braille on dollar bills. 

At a famous arts colony not long ago I complimented a staff member by saying, “hey, look! You put in an elevator so the disabled can get up and down the stairs!” “Oh,” he said, “they made us do that!”  

So much for disability as inclusion. You were again “Unfunded Mandate.”

It’s not your fault the abled classes still think cripples are inconvenient. 

It’s not your fault that Erving Goffman’s “stigma” sill permeates society. 

It’s certainly not your fault that as legal scholar Mary Anne Franks puts it, the US constitution is framed on a narrative faleshood: 

“America is built on a lie. That lie inheres in its foundational text, the Constitution of the United States, which begins in the false claim to speak of and for “we the people ” even as the majority of its population – in particular black men and all women – were denied access to the most basic forms of political participation. This act of simultaneous symbolic inclusion and material exclusion has never been fully acknowledged or confronted, which is another way of saying that it has never really ended. ”

Excerpt From: Sarat, Austin. “Law and Lies.” Apple Books. 

Dear Friend, these things are not your fault. 

You make it possible for the disabled to demand symbolic and material inclusion against so many odds.

Thirty for Thirty on The ADA: “Masks”

As we near the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act I’ve decided to post thirty short essays about the law, the anniversary, and the cultural impact of #ADA @30. I’m doing this as a disabled person who’s lived half his life before the ADA. I’m reflecting on the “before and after” of the law.

Essay Nine: “Masks”

The American writer William Gass once wrote “culture has completed its work when everything is a sign.” It’s an ominous statement if, as I do, you believe culture moves like a river and is never still. Progress rides on currents. Still I’ll take Gass at his intended word—small “c” culture demands petrifaction, signs to rivet the mind and stop all thinking. Gass was warning us and his employment of culture has invisible quotation marks. One may also fairly say this about disability signs. They circumscribe the disabled, are sometimes a matter of envy among able bodied people who resent our perceived privileges, and though our signs are liberating, they can entrap us—they’re outdated the moment we post them, they don’t represent real humans. And who is really disabled anyway? It’s a 19th century word. It’s as outdated as antimacassars on horsehair chairs.

The ADA @ 30 cannot know this. It’s a living law but not your disabled neighbor. That the very word disability needs to be retired is unquestionable even as perhaps, the opinion may not be universally popular. We the disabled have fought too hard for our place at the table. We’ve fought too hard for our dignity and our sense of inclusion. Giving away the disability word would be foolish. Even a kind of defeat.

But one thinks of Willian Gass. Disability is an ossified sign and the public that imagines itself without disability (a fantasy if ever there was one….like believing in the tooth fairy) takes it to mean lack of capacity. The ADA @ 30 cannot fix this but its a real problem. The employer who turns away disabled job applicants believes culture has completed its work—thinks disability means lack of intelligence, stamina, gumption, power, potential, on and on it goes.

We change the universal wheelchair logo to make the wheelchair look more mobile, even a bit jazzy. I like it. Every wheelchair user I’ve ever known was both mobile and jazzy. This is true of blind folks whether they travel with a cane or a dog; true of the deaf who are poets of the vernacular and the sublime, sometimes making the the same thing. It’s true of my autist friends. They all know what Emily Dickinson meant when she said poetry makes the top of her head fly off. Autists move in spaces even NASA doesn’t know about.

Disability activists have claimed the world cripple to offset the cultural bone yard of the “d” word. As the late Nancy Mairs wrote” “as a cripple I swagger.” I’ve always liked this. I also admire the idea of “crippling” as a troubling of normal-think. Disabled lives are inventive lives; we are indeed “troubling” to normal people but we offer tons of imagination. Siri came from the blind and not your business as usual dudes.

I’ll take cripple over disability but main street still doesn’t see it. We need an expanded word for citizen as Black Lives Matter tries to tell us, as the Me Too Movement tries to tell us. I’m not abled or disabled, I’m a citizen, equal to you and you.

I like universal citizen.

This means I’m imagining citizenship as achievement, accomplishment, capacity.

Now I’ve a theory of sorts. Lost in the American culture war over wearing masks in a pandemic—lost in all the back flips from the right—lost in the arguments (such as they are) about the freedom to not wear a mask, the liberation from government control, the “don’t tread on me” flag waving—lost in all of this is a fundamental ableism, a sign, a William Gass irony. Masks make people look ill; appear disabled; resemble second class citizens. This is primitive ableist exceptionalism smothering science and common sense.

The disabled know all about it. I remember the cab driver in New York City who told me I was obviously a victim of voodoo. How else to explain blindness?

The cripples know we appear sinister. And the maskless believe they’ll be stuck forever in the land of broken toys if they succumb and do something that would save their lives.