Disability Futures

With the rise in autism and other developmental and learning disability diagnoses over the last few decades, conversations around neurodiversity – which is the idea that neurological differences likeautism and ADHD are the result of normal, natural variation in the human genome, not the result of disease or injury.  

On the most basic of levels, feminism is about justice and equality for women. And obviously, there are many, many neurodivergent and/or disabled women, as well as disabled women who are intersectionally marginalized in the areas of race, sexual orientation, etc. 

So, similar to issues of race and sexual orientation, we can’t talk about women without talking about neurodiversity. 

If we exclude disabled women from the conversation, we’re missing out a huge chunk of the female population, just like we do when we don’t include women of color, non-heterosexual women, and trans or gender nonconforming women in our feminism. 

In 2012, Matt McCann visited London thinking he had booked the perfect hotel room.

Beyond searching for a good price and decent location, he needed a hotel designed with accessibility in mind. McCann has cerebral palsy and uses a rolling walker to get around, and found a place that seemed to meet his needs. But he soon find out that, while the hotel marketed itself as accessible, it was anything but.

The troubling experience led the Irish graduate from the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM) to take on the overall issue himself. He created Access Earth, a web platform and app that crowdsources data on accessible buildings and locations to help people with disabilities.

Actually, there's no particular reason you should, since the opinion upholds the sterilization law in the state of Virginia, of the United States, and was written to deliver by that great American jurist, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

SIEGEL: The ruling in question was from the 1927 case, Buck v. Bell. And what brings that scene to mind is Adam Cohen's new book about the case. It's called "Imbeciles," and it's a reminder that ideas we associate with the worst tyranny of the 20th century were actually native to our country and very popular among its elites. Adam Cohen, welcome to the program.

Some of this information is extremely disturbing, so please keep that in mind. 

This list only contains the names of those who died; there are others who found their lives at threat or faced an attempted murder but who survived who are not listed, but who were targeted due to the same disregard for life when that life is disabled. 

Advocates of low-cost housing scored a legal victory Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court left intact a ruling by California's highest court allowing cities and counties to require builders to include a percentage of affordable units in each new development.

The building industry had argued that those requirements amount to a government confiscation of property and should be allowed only if a particular development would cause a shortage of affordable housing. The state Supreme Court rejected those arguments unanimously in June, and the nation's high court denied review Monday.

Still, in most places, the legal responsibility to clear sidewalks and walkways lies with adjacent property owners. For wheelchair users, the options are often limited: In most cases, they can either ask a neighbor or local organization directly for help, or call their city government to request volunteer assistance. Non-governmental services like Help Around Town and Snow Crew allowresidents to post job listings or request snow shoveling help as well.

According to Ben Berkowitz, CEO of SeeClickFix, which operates Snow Crew, this year alone has already yielded around 650 volunteer shovel requests in the cities where the service is offered. But only 120 of them—or around 20 percent—have been met. While Snow Crew’s services are made visible to the public via local governments and email lists, Berkowitz says “there’s probably more people that need assistance than there are to volunteer.”

This can leave wheelchair users—including students and working citizens—stuck in their homes for much longer than the average resident. “I tell people to prepare for at least a week,” says Edith Prentiss, a New York resident and the head of the civil rights organization Disabled in Action. “Two years ago, I was in for at least two weeks.”

The Obama administration says too many minority students are being singled out for special education and is asking states to address the issue.

With new data in hand, the Education Department said Tuesday that disparities persist in the nation's public schools, where oftentimes minority students are more likely to be identified as having a disability and face harsher discipline than their white counterparts.

"When we see students in any racial or ethnic group identified with disabilities at vastly higher rates than their peers, we owe it to these students to pause, step back and rethink," Acting Education Secretary John B. King Jr. said in a phone call with reporters."

It is "something we can and must fix," he said.

The department is proposing a new rule with two key parts.

States would be required to adopt a standard approach to compare racial and ethnic groups and determine when disparities are significant. Basically, it calls for a uniform way to measure when there's an overrepresentation of minority students in special education.

Once overrepresentation is identified in a district, school officials would have more flexibility under the proposed rule in how they spend their federal dollars allocated under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.

Currently, when a district is tagged as having significant disparities, it must set aside 15 percent of its IDEA money to provide early intervening services, beginning in kindergarten. The proposed rule would broaden that and include services to students with and without disabilities, beginning in preschool.

Believing that prisons represent the “New Institutions,” TL fights daily to ensure that Deaf prisoners and defendants receive equal access to the legal system by educating hearing justice professionals. Having testified in front of numerous legislative bodies; and trained Congressional members, attorneys, government officials, and corrections employees about Deaf culture and Communication TL actively pulls what’s in the shadows into light to demonstrate just how truly significant the disparities are in the justice system.

TL leads HEARD’s Deaf Prisoner Phone Justice Campaign which works to ensure that tens of thousands of deaf prisoners and their family members have access to accessible telecommunications in jails and prisons, including videophones, captioned telephones, and other auxiliary aids. TL worked closely with Al Jazeera America producers for more than two years on a documentary, “Deaf In Prison,” and spearheaded a “Know Your Rights” campaign with the American Civil Liberties Union and Marlee Matlin to curtail police brutality against deaf people. TL writes extensively about discrimination against deaf and disabled people within the justice, legal and corrections systems & actively resists institutional oppression that perpetuates this status quo. TL was honored as a White House Champion of Change in 2015. TL is a founder of #DisabilitySolidarity