From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: M-FEM: progressives and disability rights (fwd)
Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 10:51:16 -0600 (CST)


Forwarded message:
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 10:49:28 -0600 (CST)
From: Kelly Pierce <kelly-AT-ripco.com>
To: nwrc-AT-wwa.com
Subject: progressives and disability rights 

radicals, particularly anarchists do a better job.

kelly 

                                                            Electric EDGE
                                                           Web Edition of
                                                          The Ragged Edge
                                                             Nov/Dec 1997
     _________________________________________________________________
   
                    Progressives and disability rights:
                           They just don't get it
                                      
   Get together with two or more disability activists for any length of
   time and the topic will come up: progressive organizations don't care
   a thing about disability rights. Don't understand 'em, don't want to
   understand them. Don't want to be bothered with access.
   
                         Reporting by Mary Johnson
                                      
   Drawing of a staircase
   
   When disability activist Mark Johnson moved to Atlanta in 1986, he
   wanted to do organizing work for ADAPT. He first approached
   traditional disability groups like UCP and Easter Seals. "They weren't
   interested."
   
   He then approached the Fund for Southern Communities, a
   community-based progressive fund that often makes grants to social
   action and direct change groups.
   
   "I called them and they said a funding cycle was about to begin and to
   get a proposal in to them," he recalls. "Of course, when I got there,
   their office was inaccessible."
   
   Johnson recalls getting to the Fund's office -- a small house -- and,
   finding steps to the door, driving his van across the grass to the
   side of the house and banging on the outside wall until somebody came
   out to take his grant.
   
   Everyone in the movement has war stories of pushing some liberal group
   on access.
   
   When famous
   progressives talk
   about 'isms --
   racism, sexism --
   disability is rarely
   part of the discussion
   
   Johnson got his funding -- $900 that first year, which helped the
   small Atlanta ADAPT group get to the Detroit "We Will Ride!" action.
   
   He stuck with the Fund for Southern Communities. The Fund ramped its
   entrance. Johnson was named to its board, and in 1989 became chair of
   the funding group. Grants to Atlanta disability activists increased,
   even after Johnson left as chair; at one time the Atlanta coalition
   Let's Get Together got $25,000 from the group.
   
   But with leadership changes, the group's focus shifted once again.
   Environmental causes eclipsed disability issues. Two years ago, the
   Fund moved to new, inaccessible offices. "They made a commitment to
   make it accessible," says Johnson, somewhat ruefully. "But it hasn't
   happened yet."
   
   "I'm frustrated with liberals," says Zan Thornton, head of Disabled
   Queers in Action. At least with conservatives, "you expect them to not
   understand rights.
   
   "But liberals say, 'How dare you!' Liberals cannot handle it when we
   accuse them of not respecting rights.
   
   "The way to piss off a liberal is to say, 'you're discriminating.'
   They've got this 'I'm better than you because I'm liberal and I
   contribute to all these good causes' attitude. But their solution to
   inaccessibility is to drag you up steps [into a building]. They'll
   'help' you."
   
   Both liberals and conservatives, says Thornton, are all too willing to
   "help." What irks her is that liberals do not seem to really try to
   understand about rights when it comes to disabled people.
   
   Johnson's story is repeated in many communities. In Louisville in the
   early 1980s, disability activist Charlie Pratt became active in
   Kentucky's American Civil Liberties Union chapter, eventually becoming
   its chair. During his tenure, the ACLU in Kentucky undertook
   pioneering voting access lawsuits and had some influence on the
   national ACLU board in disability rights matters. In the years after
   Pratt's death, the group's interest in disability rights waned and
   then seemed to disappear altogether.
   
   "When famous progressives talk about 'isms' -- racism, sexism --
   disability is rarely part of that discussion," says ADAPT's Robin
   Stephens. "Progressives don't want to deal with our issues at all."
   
   Stephens works with a progressive funding group on the national level.
   "They have a very elaborate affirmative action policy -- which, of
   course, doesn't include disability." When Stephens proposed that they
   change the policy to include disability, they agreed. Two years later,
   nothing had happened with the policy.
   
   Thornton is on the board of her local chapter of the American Civil
   Liberties Union. The building in which they hold meetings has a 2-step
   entrance. Even at the ACLU, says Thornton, it seems disability rights
   are viewed as "special rights" -- the same attitude activists get from
   right-wing disability rights opponents. "It's the same thing the
   Christian Coalition is saying," says Thornton.
   
   Stephens says she realized last June "just how much the local group
   'didn't get it' " when her group's board met to discuss their
   investment policy. "I suggested they avoid investments with
   corporations involved with nursing homes, assisted living facilities
   and group homes. Half the board freaked out. 'Oh, nursing homes are
   good places ...' 'I used to work at a group home ...' -- the usual
   bullshit."
   
   I suggested they avoid
   investments in
   corporations involved
   with nursing homes.
   They freaked out.
   'Nursing homes are
   good places ...'
   
   When the ACLU refused to hire registered interpreters for a recent
   meeting, Thornton, who can interpret, was pressed into service. Deaf
   advocates who attended the meeting left when Thornton had to take a
   break; the ACLU had not wanted to spend the funds to guarantee a
   back-up interpreter.
   
   It sometimes "seems that progressives will never learn," says a
   frustrated Stephens.
   
   "It always takes someone being 'in your face,' " Johnson says. It
   doesn't seem to happen any other way. "When I was on the Fund's board
   they put access first," he added.
   
   Now it seems things at the Fund, like so many progressive groups, are
   back to inaccessible as usual.
   
   Eleanor Smith of Concrete Change (see D.R. Nation, page 5) had a grant
   due in September; she couldn't hand deliver it because the Fund's
   office, after 2 years in its new location, is still blocked by steps.
   Smith questions the group's commitment to access, given that they
   installed an electronic gate into their parking lot in order to keep
   out "vagrants" but said they could not find funds to ramp a 2-step
   entrance.
   
   Sometimes disability advocates try to get funding groups to make their
   grantees sign a commitment requiring access as a condition of
   receiving funds. Even that is difficult to get funders to do, says
   Thornton. They may have their grantees sign such a form, but rarely do
   they hold the group to its word; rarely is lack of accessibility
   grounds for withholding grant money.
   
   "And yet all these folks are very nice people," says Thornton. "But
   they are very misguided."
   
   Stephens lists frustrations most activists have faced in dealing with
   progressive groups: When the disability community tries to hold an
   educational seminar, nobody comes. Or they get angry if the seminar
   isn't free. When progressives form coalitions to deal with a social
   issue, and disability activists join, nobody wants to deal with access
   issues, hire interpreters, use alternative formats to print.
   
   Deaf advocates left the
   meeting. The ACLU had
   not wanted to hire a
   back-up interpreter.
   
   Is there some "greater scheme" at work that none of us knows about,
   where people in progressive movements actively dislike disability
   rights? Johnson thinks not. "It's like anything else. The squeaky
   wheel gets the grease. They can be nice, well intentioned people, but
   . . . It's not like my presence alone was enough," he says, referring
   to his experience with the Fund for Southern Communities. Even having
   a relationship with someone at a progressive organization isn't
   enough. "We needed both."
   
   Johnson also warned about the tendency of some disability activists to
   ignore other social justice issues. What kind of a message does it
   send to environmentalists, he says, if we hold a meeting and use
   styrofoam cups? "You've still got a lot of folks waiting to see if
   you're involved in other [progressive] issues."
   
   Johnson makes a distinction, too, between his experience in Georgia
   with a progressive funding group and other situations. Funders are one
   thing; progressive leaders are another, he suggests.
   
   He recalls ADAPT's frustration at its Detroit bus demonstration in the
   mid 1980s when civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who achieved fame for her
   insistence on the right of blacks to ride buses like whites, refused
   to lend support to ADAPT's march for their right to ride buses -- and
   for Jesse Jackson's lack of interest in lending support.
   
   Drawing, front of house with steps
   
   "It's been an ongoing frustration," said Johnson. But he also called
   that 1987 effort to get traditional civil rights leaders to lead an
   ADAPT action a case of "giving away our power." The disability
   movement could do things on its own, with its own power, he said.
   
   Johnson said he had never seen the disability movement "sit down and
   have a bigger conversation about 'why.' " So he posed some of those
   questions for himself:
   
   "I've asked myself, It is because we haven't been involved in civil
   rights as long? Is it that people just don't care? Or that they think
   it's the not the same form of oppression? Is it because it's easier to
   see oppression abroad than at home?
   
   There's still a step in front of the Southern Christian Leadership
   Conference office, said Johnson, referring to an issue that's been a
   sore spot with the Atlanta disability community for a decade.
   
   "You can't assume that just because they're for one progressive issue,
   they're for our issues," said Johnson. "You can't assume that they're
   going to 'get it' about disability rights."