3 Weekly Disability Reads

Every Sunday I post links to three things about disability that I read, heard, or viewed over the previous week, with some notes on why I found them interesting and worth sharing.

December 7-13, 2020:

1. Calling for Home Care
New York Caring Majority - December 2020

This is the rare disability advocacy video that successfully blends often competing priorities and impulses. It highlights both the struggles of underpaid and under-recognized home care workers, and the people they serve. Both the care givers and care users have a voice and they support each other, instead of just one group speaking on behalf of the other, or in some sort of passive conflict for focus. And the video itself invokes the viewer’s emotions and dramatizes the stakes, without appealing to pity.

2. Rebecca Lamorte’s Subway Accident Launched Her Political Career
Rebecca Lamorte, Teen Vogue - December 7, 2020

Over the last few years, Teen Vogue has been giving a lot of space and quality writing to disabled people and disability issues. This piece is a great example. The writer’s story is broadly relatable, and the message about disability is right on target. Again, you feel something for Rebecca’s situation. Yet, you’re left not with a useless sadness, but with a better understanding of what actually makes life unnecessarily hard for people with disabilities. The article also demonstrates the direct connection between disability and politics. It’s a connection disability activists are already familiar with, but which can still feel radical to the casual observer. There can’t be too many stories like this.

3. Why autism training for police isn’t enough
Elissa Ball & Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky, Spectrum - November 26, 2020

Debates over what to actually do about police violence against disabled people – especially autistic people and people of color – usually involve simple binary conflict. On one side are advocates who promote “police training” as a simple, straightforward answer to what are often viewed as tragic misunderstandings. On the other side are those who view “more training” as worse than useless – as misleading diversions from the real problem, which is the police profession’s core hostility to people of color and anyone perceived to be even slightly strange or threatening. This article won’t satisfy anyone. But at least it gives due consideration to many angles on the issue, with a focus on what might actually be done that would be actually worth doing.