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By Ellen-Rae Cachola
Disability Rights through the ADA
July 26 is National Disability Independence Day, the day when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990.
This landmark U.S. law builds on the 1964 civil rights act by prohibiting discrimination against those with disabilities. It was an unprecedented bipartisan effort that recognized the years of discrimination against the community of those with disabilities, also known as the differently abled, and fundamentally improved their freedom and way of life (Puget Sound Educational Service District 2023).
Over time, changes improved mobility and safety that differently abled people faced. Common barriers such as narrow doors and small bathroom stalls became accessible to wheelchairs. Braille signs and crosswalks were implemented for the vision impaired.
Beyond structural changes, technology was enhanced through assistive technologies making it possible for persons to access their legal and health information.
Today, brick and mortar businesses are ADA compliant. As more businesses move online, websites need to be accessible too. The implementation of ADA entails forward-thinking design and technology (National Day Calendar 2024).The Pacific ADA Center was created to help people understand and apply disability rights laws in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, and the Pacific Basin. In particular, they help people with disabilities, businesses, government agencies, nonprofits, ADA coordinator networks, employers. To find out more about ADA centers in other regions, see here (Pacific ADA Center, n.d.).
Disability Justice
Another spin off of the passage of the ADA was the creation of the Disability Justice movement. In 2005, Sins Invalid, a collective of disabled queer women of color, including Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Milbern, coined the term “disability justice,” to take a more comprehensive approach to increase ways of thinking to advocate for the rights of disabled people. Specifically, they recognized how disabled people, who belong to additional marginalized communities, may experience intersecting and compounding systems of oppression that interact and reinforce each other.
They developed the Disability Justice framework to define how people marginalized on the axes of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, incarceration, and colonial displacement, experience their disabilities in conjunction with other disadvantages and hardships (Berne 2015).
Disability Justice advocacy goes beyond the disability rights movement that relies on litigation and a bureaucratic sector that implements the ADA laws. Disability Justice leaders saw how the disability rights approach was framed as a single, identity based issue, historically centered white experiences, and prevented a broad-based popular movement. ADA laws left out other forms of disability, marginalizing those who were impaired in ways other than mobility.
The leaders behind Disability Justice sparked the “second wave” of the disability rights movement. Their focus was to decenter able-bodied supremacy and how it was upheld by systems of domination and exploitation, such as colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and other unequal relationships in which an “ideal bodymind is built upon the exclusion and elimination of a subjugated ‘other’ whom profits and status are extracted.” (Hudson 2022).
The Disability Justice movement holds a vision of collective solidarity and interdependence among disabled people and others striving for justice amidst colonial and capitalist oppressions. Some strategies are advocating to include differently abled people’s full experiences of intersecting discriminations and exclusions to shape decisions and policy making in education, employment, housing, and health care (Jones 2022). Disability Justice believes that in long histories of social justice, differently abled people have been part of those efforts to envision and create a world where beings of all abilities flourish and belong.
Bibliography
Berne, Patty. Disability Justice – a working draft. Sins Invalid: An Unashamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility, June 10, 2015. https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne
Hudson, Hailey. Moving from Disability Rights to Disability Justice. World Institute on Disability, 2022. https://wid.org/moving-from-disability-rights-to-disability-justice/
Jones, Keith. “Confronting Ableism on the Way to Justice,” SPLC Learning for Justice, 2022. https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2022/confronting-ableism-on-the-way-to-justice
National Day Calendar. NATIONAL DISABILITY INDEPENDENCE DAY | July 26. 2024. https://www.nationaldaycalendar.com/national-day/national-disability-independence-day-july-26
Pacific ADA Center. Serving. Pacific ADA Center, n.d. https://www.adapacific.org
Puget Sound Educational Service District. It’s National Disability Independence Day! Puget Sound Educational Service District, Excellence & Equity in Education, July 26, 2023. Accessed July 25, 2024. https://www.psesd.org/news/detail/~board/news/post/its-national-disability-independence-day