Thoughts on labels, labels by whom?, ostentatious sensitivity, and
business as usual ignoring us altogether in the liberal establishment
. . . . .
Someone writes that the term 'people with disabilites" may have come
from AB people wanting to cute-ify or feel comfortable. News to me.
The term that fits THAT historic description to my knowledge, is
"differently abled". Which seems to be an indication that the
politically correct in the 1970's (back when that label itself impled a
sense of humor & perspective, not what it was twisted into by the
Right).... this term showes that PC folks DID notice PWDs and then
quickly dropped the political ball. "Differently abled" seems to be the
pinnacle of what I call "ostentatious sensivity" (meaning -- more
posturing surface, than applied subtance),
Whenver "progressive" (formerly "radical", formerly "new left",
formerly.....) people use the excuse that they or their movement never
thought about things like having their public meetings and events in
accessible locations....(the schtick goes like this: "So what do you
want? We've just been given notice that this is important, one minute
ago; and this is not the cheapest way to set up a meeting, so forget it;
it's up to you to find us a free accessible meeting hall").... I find it
useful to remember the term "differetly abled", as proof that it ain't
so. AB progressives will have to come up with a new excuse. You can't
claim to have never been notified of something that you even made up a
PC name for.
"Differently abled" I heard several times in the 70's (mostly in print),
and very few times after that. I have never heard it come out of the
mouth of a PWD.
As for "disabled person" vs. people with disabilites".... I think we
have to remember that what "label' gets picked and established, isn't
all a matter of facts, logic, "Does it work in all grammatical forms?",
etc. Granted scholars like to be careful and precise with language, but
whren you're studying a phenonomon that is more fluid, one can "clarify"
things more than they really are, in the real world. (i.e.: it seems
improbable that while "Colored" went out generations ago, "people of
color" is now di rigeur here. The African American civil rights
movement spent decades trying ot teach people not to call black males
over 18 a "boy", and then the term "B-Boy" emerges in hip hop culture.
Word analysis alone couldn't have predicted these things.) There is a
subjective thing of "sounds OK to me" that has to do with what speads in
culture more and what spreads less.
To my ear, "people with disabilites" respectfully imples that the
disability isn't 100% of what the person is all about, whereas "disabled
person" does, making PWD the clear winner.
Also let's not forget that terminology is situational. We bring up and
adjective or label when there is a reason in that communication. When I
lecture on universal design, I use PWD adn people with iumpairments, or
people with mobilitiy disabilities or people with certain impairments,
etc., depending on what best and most accurately fits the context of
what I have to say. Usually I am saying something rather focussed, so
the question isn't "What label is best in gerneral?" Similarly, in
personal conversation disabilty probaby comes up for a specific
reason... so the term if one comes up at all..... may be selected for
that context.
--
(JC:) I haven't noticed able-bodied masses trying to get anyone to call
themselves "person with a disability".
As far As I know, AB people typicaly want the whole idea of disabled
rights to just go away. (And they'd want the notion of emerging
disability culture to go away too, if they had ever heard of it.) That
is, unless thay can make money off us. As far as I know, they don't
want us to call ourselves anything, because doing so with any term at
all, implies that we have some self-respect and might assert some pesky
rights.
While this board is debating how many label-angels can dance on the head
of a pin, the AB world even in it's more liberal or "progressive"
mileaus, from what I can see in my community involvements -- seem to
continue dissing us to the point of trying to forget that we exist, at
all.
--
In the U.S. there is a "progressive" non-profit radio network with 5
stations, Pacifica Radio Foundation. ( www.pacificaradio.org ) It
unrelentingly defines rights, sensitivity and diversity in only terms of
race, ethnicity, sometimes gender, and then 99 times out of a hundred
the list closes.... both in casual conversation, or even when policy is
being made. It is as if they haven't learned one new thing about
diversity or rights since the year 1968. Getting sexual orientation or
PWDs onto that "short list", to make it a reality-based "long list"....
is like Sisypheus pushing a boulder up the hill.
If a LGBT person isn't in the room or "at the table", they always
"forget" or treat in a grossly unequal manner, that segment of something
like 15% of the local population and listeners when it comes to
discussing programming, internal rights policies, balanced membership on
decision-making boards, balanced employment policies, etc. Similarly,
if no PWD (or more precisely "out PWD" or... one for whom being "out"
is not applicable because it's obvious) is in the room or "at the
table", they inevitably just happen to 'forget" the biggest stigmatized
minority in the country, which is (I just did the census-based research)
about 18% of the listeners to their New York City area station, WBAI
99.5 FM.
Both PWDs and our rights, and LGBT people and our rights, seem to be
topics that often give AB and/or heterosexual people faux-amnesia. In
one ear and out the other. Every time they hear about it becomes the
"first". So why have't they made any progress over the years? Because
(they say this standard lie with a "straight face): "You're the first
person to meniton this."
In New York City, there is a huge institutionally-organised public input
process on the city planning for reconstruction of the World Trade
Center area being organsised by a "good government" group / planning
lobby the Regional Planning Assn., with three universities (NYU, New
School U. and Pratt Institute, my alma mater), which has organised a
coalition of over 80 community based orgs. I have joined this as a
representative of Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York. In
February they held a public input session of 650 people, and did polling
to determine the diversity of those in the room (you enter replies into
wireless keypad, and it's put up on screens, and then compared with the
stats of the region to see if they met their goal of a representative
crowd). In the firrst 10 minutes of this all-day meeting, they
determined the mix of the crowd in terms of gender, racial
identification, age, income, place of residence, if you were an
emergency services worker on that attack site, or if you were impacted
by the attack of 9-11 in terms of lost a family member or a job,
What's missing from this picture?
They didn't bother to also determine the diversity and balance in the
crowd to see if it met their goals of being "representative", in terms
of also... LGBT people or PWDs. ----- In the earlier attack on the same
building in 1993 in the early morning, it took until after 10 pm to get
the last PWD evacuated. On 9-11-01 the smoke and dust tsunami blasted
throught the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and Access-A-Ride drivers with
busses full of people with severe disabilites abandoned their busses in
the tunnel and ran away... leaving those people to sit there for hours
choking and wondering when or if they'd be rescued. In spite of the
fact that PWD's sometimes take much longer to evacuate, this time the
landlord of the twin towers actually was telling people over the
loudspeakers in the south tower not to evacuate, after the north tower
was hit by the plane. The official evacuation of the south tower only
began after it was hit by the second plane. As a result, not only did
may more die in the south tower, but people who can't run down the
stairs fast were obviously disproportionately among the dead. A
disproportionate impact made worse by every minute in the delay in
notifying the south tower occupants to evacuate. Showing that the
impact of an event like this on PWDs (see my friend Edwina Julliet's
article in the December 1993 'Fire Engineering' magazine; their on-line
archive doesn't go back that far; you have to buy a back-issue) didn't
succeed in teaching the building's management how to do things any
better, esp. in terms of protecting PWDs.
LGBT lovers / family members with no legal status allowed.... found
themselves being discriminated against by various programs to help the
survivors' next of kin. And found themselves having to fight for any
3rd class rights at all. But why bother to determine if there were any
of THEM in the room?
Both of these minorities were very definitely disprportionaterly
impacted. WhIch is usually liberal's reason for specific actions to
cinclude, listen, etc.
At the February 2002 event, they said they increase outreach to fix any
discovered shortfall in getting representative percentages into the
room. I suggested to the leader of one of the convening groups that
they should do outreach to disabled orgs and ask that as one of the
questions next time. He seemed to agree. Yesterday at the second
high-tech public input event for 5,000 people held at the Javits
Convention Center, neither happened. I didn't have time to survey the
whole room (I had answered a last minute call for more facilitators for
the tables of 11 which are the building block of these events; so I was
working) The only other people with (perceivable) disabilites in the
room I saw were 3 DIA people I had invited. Plus I know of a 4th. 4
out of 5,000. Less than one percent isn't good, for the largest
minority in the country.
So while DS scholars debate labels, we're being pretty well ignored, no
matterw what the label. Maybe we should call ourselves: "the group who
you can never remember"?
In terms of the input itself, our attempts to get it into the report on
the first meeting's input failed. I then did several months of work
through one of the 6 standing committees of the Civic Aliance and got
about 10 words into the report which will come out soon (see
www.renewNYC.org for the report, not on the July 20 meeting but the long
version of the report from the first half of the year), otherwise just
got the tepid phrase 'accessible for PWDs" into the design criteria,
which implies per the (weak) building code, which is smaller what what I
was advocating. At yesterday's giant meeting, again PWDs got that
input in, but it got whittled down by intent or by accident of AB's who
don't understant, just to "accessibilty".
I think my next project will be to educate the event's producers (a
non-profit called America Speaks which the Civic Alliance hired) to get
their staff who crunch the input and summmarize it, to undersatnd the
vocabulary of access, universal design, versus merely code compliant
design.
Also if I have time I'll volunteer this week to help collate the input
data, and get a glimpse of what the reality is, there. That may be
where training needs to improved? It seems like 95% of the labor in
these events is volunteer... like they drew volunteer professional
facilitators from all 50 states and 6 countries.... for yesterday's
event. Who the info collators and rephrasers are (about 20 at the
meeting itself, summing up input sentances entered from any of the
wirelessly linked laptops on each of the 500 tables of participants) I
don't know. I suspect college student volunteers.
--
How PWDs fare in public input gathering proccesses, is an interesting
topic that I'm planning to write on sometime this year. I've organised
proceses specifically for us, and now I've experienced a ore
professionally run process both as a person giving input, and later as a
person working as a facilitator. Having seen it from those three
sides.... I think I can now begin to look at the literature wherever it
is (I haven't even started to search... no doubt in the "meeting
facilitor / conflict resolution" profession?) and read it with some
grounding in the reality of what these meetings can be like.
If anyone out there can reccomend writings either scholarly or "mere
journalism" on how PWDs fare in public-input gathering efforts...
.....please write to me at the above address. Thanks.
Alternate E-Mail address [log in to unmask] (As my printer is now
broken and awaiting replacement, I'll list my snail-mail address, too.)
Jim Davis
POB 9452, Elmora Station
Elizabeth, NJ 07202-0452
USA
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