Last year, the former chief of the Santa Fe, N.M., police department, Donald Grady II, said something that stuck with me. “There’s a thing that we call freedom of movement,” he said in an interview with The Atlantic, “which is really revered in this country — that we should have the right to move freely without impingement from the police simply because.” He was speaking as both a black man and a police officer about the ways racial discrimination can limit a basic right. But I related to this on more than one level.
Opinion by Luticha Doucette, published by The New York Times | May 17, 2017
As a black woman with incomplete quadriplegia and chronic pain, and as a full-time manual wheelchair user, my own ability to move freely is frequently restricted. Too often, both the lack of accessibility in public spaces and the ingrained ableism of many nondisabled people bars my way.
Let’s say I want to go out to dinner downtown. Even if I can enter an establishment — which I often can’t — very rarely is the accessible seating in a visible place, if it is there at all. Once inside, I am often relegated to a corner, the aisle, a back room. In brew pubs with high tables and high chairs, trying to have conversations at eye-level with other people’s crotches while nursing my beer leads me to feel less like an adult and more like Oliver Twist. No one wants to try the new hot spot in town and then be seated at the kids’ table.
If I arrive somewhere by myself, I am often greeted with shock when I make clear that I have no caregiver with me. If I am with a companion — a nondisabled friend or a date — it is assumed that this person is my caregiver. Sometimes it seems that people believe accessibility is having your own chaperone who goes and asks for the accessible entrance.
These are just a few variations on the sort of ableism that people with physical conditions like mine face every day. Ableism is at work when disability is not an inclusive part of the design process, where the space flows and is welcoming to all bodies. Instead, accommodations are tacked on haphazardly, leading to hostile and hard-to-navigate spaces. With the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990 — which sets standards of compliance for buildings in public spaces — progress has been made, but inclusive thinking and design are still the exception, not the norm.
Today, segregation and limiting the movement of disabled persons in public spaces is commonplace and accepted. Even in our nation’s capital, I have to use the back entrance at the National Gallery of Art. As a black woman I am keenly aware of the irony of being ushered through back ways, sketchy hallways, side entrances and kitchens to enter restaurants, bars and other establishments. My favorite bar up the street has its accessible entrance down an alley, with a steep ramp that leads to a door in the bowels of the building. There’s no signage, no security cameras, and I once saw a bloody towel covering the fire alarm. At another local restaurant, I have to enter from a side door, through the kitchen and then to the dining room. It is a running joke with my friends that if the accessible entrance is not up front, you’re going to end up needing a map to find your way through.
Some aspects of this situation, though, are too painful to joke about. Much of what people with disabilities like mine must suffer conjures the historically painful specter of racial segregation. Even at my job, where I work for the city as a researcher in a government building, there is an entrance with a double doorway for those walking in, then next to it, hidden around a pillar, a sliding door for wheelchair users. The other exterior doors have stairs leading up to them. My employer did a wonderful job in doing a walk-through with me to identify ways to solve the problem, but this raises a key point: The building was built in a time when people with disabilities were almost entirely hidden from society, and architects did not consider how such a person would use the building. This makes retrofitting an even bigger challenge. All this eerily mirrors the segregation of blacks in the workplace, where separate doors were not unusual. We need to be just as vigilant about disability inclusion as we are about racial inclusion.
In the social justice space, ableism would be categorized as a macroaggression. Disability comes with its own unique challenges and trials, but the inability to engage with, and move freely through, our communities, or not being able to easily visit friends’ and relatives’ homes — and the social isolation that follows — because inclusive design is so uncommon, is a gross violation of our rights and is detrimental to our health.
Our freedom of movement is hindered in other ways. How we move as disabled people often leads to poor encounters with the police. We are often taken for drunks, our caregivers are harmed, or even shot; we are perceived as threats and beaten when trying to communicate in sign language, or worse, killed. In March, a report published by the Ruderman Family Foundation highlighted that half of police shootings have involved a disabled person. They were also people of color. Yet these deaths are rarely spoken of in the context of the person’s disability.
To make things worse, the intersection of race, poverty and disability is often ignored. Black Lives Matter has come under much deserved criticism by black and Latinx disability rights activists for lack of inclusion in their “woke” spaces. We cannot be fully woke if we refuse to acknowledge our disabled brothers and sisters. My city has some of the highest poverty rates for minorities and for the disabled. A recent study ranked Rochester 147th out of 150 American cities in a list of best and worst places to live if you are disabled. Yet, those in poverty who are disabled live in the highest-poverty census tracts, have very low education levels, no access to jobs and a shortage of affordable, accessible housing, and lack the resources to move within their communities, which have poor transportation options. They very rarely have the opportunity to live somewhere else, nor can they fully engage with the myriad initiatives designed to lift people out of poverty.
For me, freedom of movement also encompasses the ability to move in environments without people coming up to me and touching me or invading my personal space. Black women know the violating feeling when someone decides to touch our hair without permission as we go about our daily lives. Disability adds another layer to it. A poignant moment was during prep for an M.R.I. My hair was ripped out by a white female technician because she was “curious about its softness.” My blackness was singled out and my disability used against me. She took a moment where I was vulnerable and exploited that.
But these body-autonomy violations are a regular occurrence. People push my chair without asking, and often in the wrong direction, and shove me in the back as a way of “helping” me propel my chair — my movement and autonomy are constantly being challenged. And just as black men experience people moving to the other side of the street or white women clutching their purses on the assumption that they are a threat, I too experience people jumping out of the way or pulling their children to them in fear as they loudly proclaim that they don’t want to be hit by a wheelchair, even when I’m several feet from them. To be treated as something to avoid but also something to be touched at will creates an odd juxtaposition that is unique to the black disabled experience.
Navigating the world as a black woman is difficult, but I refuse to give up the fight to dismantle structural racism and structural ableism. At the core of the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter and the disability-rights movement is the idea of autonomy and agency over one’s life. We are fighting for the right to not be judged based on external sets of unrealistic expectations. The rights afforded to us in the Constitution are not fully granted to us if we are constantly obstructed by structural biases. To that end, I would paraphrase Chief Grady’s definition to be even more inclusive: We should have the right to move freely without impingement from anyone or anything. Simply because.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/opinion/if-youre-in-a-wheelchair-segregation-lives.html?_r=0Luticha Doucette is an innovation researcher for the city of Rochester and a disability-rights activist.
Disability is a New York Times weekly series of essays, art and opinion by and about people living with disabilities. The entire series can be found here. To reach the editors or submit an essay for consideration, write opinionator@nytimes.com and include “Disability” in the subject field.
Let’s say I want to go out to dinner downtown. Even if I can enter an establishment — which I often can’t — very rarely is the accessible seating in a visible place, if it is there at all. Once inside, I am often relegated to a corner, the aisle, a back room. In brew pubs with high tables and high chairs, trying to have conversations at eye-level with other people’s crotches while nursing my beer leads me to feel less like an adult and more like Oliver Twist. No one wants to try the new hot spot in town and then be seated at the kids’ table.
If I arrive somewhere by myself, I am often greeted with shock when I make clear that I have no caregiver with me. If I am with a companion — a nondisabled friend or a date — it is assumed that this person is my caregiver. Sometimes it seems that people believe accessibility is having your own chaperone who goes and asks for the accessible entrance.
These are just a few variations on the sort of ableism that people with physical conditions like mine face every day. Ableism is at work when disability is not an inclusive part of the design process, where the space flows and is welcoming to all bodies. Instead, accommodations are tacked on haphazardly, leading to hostile and hard-to-navigate spaces. With the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990 — which sets standards of compliance for buildings in public spaces — progress has been made, but inclusive thinking and design are still the exception, not the norm.
Today, segregation and limiting the movement of disabled persons in public spaces is commonplace and accepted. Even in our nation’s capital, I have to use the back entrance at the National Gallery of Art. As a black woman I am keenly aware of the irony of being ushered through back ways, sketchy hallways, side entrances and kitchens to enter restaurants, bars and other establishments. My favorite bar up the street has its accessible entrance down an alley, with a steep ramp that leads to a door in the bowels of the building. There’s no signage, no security cameras, and I once saw a bloody towel covering the fire alarm. At another local restaurant, I have to enter from a side door, through the kitchen and then to the dining room. It is a running joke with my friends that if the accessible entrance is not up front, you’re going to end up needing a map to find your way through.
Some aspects of this situation, though, are too painful to joke about. Much of what people with disabilities like mine must suffer conjures the historically painful specter of racial segregation. Even at my job, where I work for the city as a researcher in a government building, there is an entrance with a double doorway for those walking in, then next to it, hidden around a pillar, a sliding door for wheelchair users. The other exterior doors have stairs leading up to them. My employer did a wonderful job in doing a walk-through with me to identify ways to solve the problem, but this raises a key point: The building was built in a time when people with disabilities were almost entirely hidden from society, and architects did not consider how such a person would use the building. This makes retrofitting an even bigger challenge. All this eerily mirrors the segregation of blacks in the workplace, where separate doors were not unusual. We need to be just as vigilant about disability inclusion as we are about racial inclusion.
In the social justice space, ableism would be categorized as a macroaggression. Disability comes with its own unique challenges and trials, but the inability to engage with, and move freely through, our communities, or not being able to easily visit friends’ and relatives’ homes — and the social isolation that follows — because inclusive design is so uncommon, is a gross violation of our rights and is detrimental to our health.
Our freedom of movement is hindered in other ways. How we move as disabled people often leads to poor encounters with the police. We are often taken for drunks, our caregivers are harmed, or even shot; we are perceived as threats and beaten when trying to communicate in sign language, or worse, killed. In March, a report published by the Ruderman Family Foundation highlighted that half of police shootings have involved a disabled person. They were also people of color. Yet these deaths are rarely spoken of in the context of the person’s disability.
To make things worse, the intersection of race, poverty and disability is often ignored. Black Lives Matter has come under much deserved criticism by black and Latinx disability rights activists for lack of inclusion in their “woke” spaces. We cannot be fully woke if we refuse to acknowledge our disabled brothers and sisters. My city has some of the highest poverty rates for minorities and for the disabled. A recent study ranked Rochester 147th out of 150 American cities in a list of best and worst places to live if you are disabled. Yet, those in poverty who are disabled live in the highest-poverty census tracts, have very low education levels, no access to jobs and a shortage of affordable, accessible housing, and lack the resources to move within their communities, which have poor transportation options. They very rarely have the opportunity to live somewhere else, nor can they fully engage with the myriad initiatives designed to lift people out of poverty.
For me, freedom of movement also encompasses the ability to move in environments without people coming up to me and touching me or invading my personal space. Black women know the violating feeling when someone decides to touch our hair without permission as we go about our daily lives. Disability adds another layer to it. A poignant moment was during prep for an M.R.I. My hair was ripped out by a white female technician because she was “curious about its softness.” My blackness was singled out and my disability used against me. She took a moment where I was vulnerable and exploited that.
But these body-autonomy violations are a regular occurrence. People push my chair without asking, and often in the wrong direction, and shove me in the back as a way of “helping” me propel my chair — my movement and autonomy are constantly being challenged. And just as black men experience people moving to the other side of the street or white women clutching their purses on the assumption that they are a threat, I too experience people jumping out of the way or pulling their children to them in fear as they loudly proclaim that they don’t want to be hit by a wheelchair, even when I’m several feet from them. To be treated as something to avoid but also something to be touched at will creates an odd juxtaposition that is unique to the black disabled experience.
Navigating the world as a black woman is difficult, but I refuse to give up the fight to dismantle structural racism and structural ableism. At the core of the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter and the disability-rights movement is the idea of autonomy and agency over one’s life. We are fighting for the right to not be judged based on external sets of unrealistic expectations. The rights afforded to us in the Constitution are not fully granted to us if we are constantly obstructed by structural biases. To that end, I would paraphrase Chief Grady’s definition to be even more inclusive: We should have the right to move freely without impingement from anyone or anything. Simply because.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/opinion/if-youre-in-a-wheelchair-segregation-lives.html?_r=0Luticha Doucette is an innovation researcher for the city of Rochester and a disability-rights activist.
Disability is a New York Times weekly series of essays, art and opinion by and about people living with disabilities. The entire series can be found here. To reach the editors or submit an essay for consideration, write opinionator@nytimes.com and include “Disability” in the subject field.
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