In the Garden

From the Introduction, “Pathways to Disability Justice”

Envisioning the future is essential to shaping the future. This volume looks to the past and present as the threshold to a more just world for all people, including people with disabilities.

I see the possibility for a number of future pathways for what I call “disability justice.” These are not posed as alternatives. They are possibilities for simultaneous development. Perhaps each may be considered as backup to the others, thus multiplying likelihood of overall progress.

One pathway involves the United States Constitution. Current litigation often ignores the Constitution. After all, there is the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, the right to education and other statutes. However, I believe that it is possible, as the Supreme Court changes, which it will, that there will be a constitutional prohibition of discrimination against people with disabilities. I wrote a law review article advocating this result several years ago. Especially for people, (and perhaps initially only for people) confined in institutions, I think there's an argument under the Constitution to prohibit the use of congregate institutions. Olmstead v. L.C. by Zimring, 527 U.S. 581 (1999) case addressed discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act and carefully the constitutional question. That question remains open.

Another pathway involves the United States adopting the international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Convention was trumpeted in the United States by the Obama Administration. It seems now to be at the back of the back shelf in federal priorities.

A third pathway is to address our current federal and state statutes. The federal books have a plethora of statutes, some overlapping, and some with standards (including definitions of disability or eligibility for coverage), which are inconsistent with one another. We need consolidation and simplification. On the state front, advocates have been creative using state constitutions and state laws to further disability justice.

Universal design is also a pathway. Universal design has become a basis for creation of new products, buildings and environments accessible to everyone with or without disabilities. Mandating universal design would solve many of the issues we confront.

Cultural change is the final pathway to which I commend attention. Many of the essays in this volume see culture change as an essential underpinning to advances for people with disabilities. In my view, seeking such change requires a more refined articulation of our goals. Are we talking about accommodation? Inclusion? Assimilation? Disability justice advocates will need to pay increased attention to defining our direction as the issues and their solutions become more nuanced.

For people with disabilities and for our community as a whole, what is the future of disability justice? The ultimate function of prophecy is not to tell the future but to make it. We cannot count on the past, even past successes, as harbingers of the future. Those successes might block our your visions of the future. Our imagination and creativity, and our actions, will unlock the secrets of the future.

David Ferleger, Esq.

“Pathways to Disability Justice”

From the chapter, “Civil Rights Movements and People with Disabilities”

Even while working for other groups’ civil rights in the 1960s, many of us found it hard to believe the desegregation movement eventually could also bring access to us. As an undergraduate badly crippled by childhood polio, I made my legs move through painful step after step for several hours on a picket line at the local Woolworths to support the right of African Americans to be served at lunch counters throughout the Woolworth national chain. Of course, I could not get up the steps to the Woolworth store my nondisabled college mates and I were picketing, nor were the high counter stools accessible to me.

Like many other disabled people in the Northern, Mid-West and Western states at that time, I was comfortable expressing outrage that an organization doing business in my local community excluded people of color at some of its other sites. But I feared opening up to reveal my distress, or even to be indignant, at that same organization’s de facto excluding myself and other disabled people from lunching at Woolworth’s counters all across the nation.

One day two students who were blind came into the Philosophy Department office and asked for me. They said they had heard there was a faculty member with a disability and had come to request I take on university officials on their behalf in regard to their ability to satisfy the university’s general education requirements.

Unlike students who want to avoid completing requirements, these two students were complaining that they were being discriminated against because, against their own wishes, the university’s math graduation requirement was being waived for them. From my own school days, this was familiar territory to me; in high school I had been labeled a risk in chemistry laboratory because in the previous year, stretching over a lab bench from a sitting position to execute a physics lab experiment that involved a lighted candle, I had singed my hair.

I dragged myself up three flights of stairs to confront the Mathematics Department chair; the university’s classrooms and office buildings did not have elevators at that time. I explained the easy solution to him – just let them stay enrolled in the course and they would do the work. He protested that math instructors use the blackboard a great deal to demonstrate how problems ought to be solved. The department faculty had discussed the matter and decided the pedagogical problem loomed so large as to be stultifying; they didn’t know how to teach freshman mathematics to blind students.

In fact, he said, to teach anything at all the instructor must write important information – to help the students take notes – on the blackboard. As it happens, I don't write on the blackboard when I teach because I can't reach high enough on it for students to see. In hindsight, I’ve been teaching with excellent student outcomes and ratings for nearly fifty years now and still am not able to write on the board.

My former students, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in the field, testify that they learned more than a little from me, but such future evidence did not yet exist. And I was feeling threatened by a presumption nondisabled people like the Mathematics Department chair so often and so erroneously make: thinking that the way they do things is the only way those things can be done.

I’m not sure what made the Mathematics Department chair relent. Possibly it was the novelty of the idea I then launched. As both students had completed four years of high school math with excellent grades (and were much more advanced in the discipline than most other students), I argued, why not ask them what they needed to learn math in the course? Surely they knew how they did it. Plus, after listening to sighted students complaining they had trouble with math and asking to be released from the requirement, there was the novelty of blind students whose high school grades showed they had no trouble with math and who desired to meet the mathematics requirement, instead of evading it.

Or else it was the novelty of facing an enraged female faculty member who apparently wasn’t going to leave his office until he gave in. (Actually, I was trying to catch my breath for the laborious descent down three flights of stairs.)

Professor Anita Silvers